1930's Fashion

1930's Fashion

The 1030s saw the growth and development of mass manufacture and the birth of cheaper ready-to-wear fashion with improved sizing and fit spearheaded by American innovation. Women had an increasing variety of shops from which to choose, including small independent and new multiples such as Marks and Spencer. Shops thrived in spite of the Depression while the shopping experience underwent major changes. Price tickets were now displayed and the customer was free to wander around open plan departments looking and touching. The shop assistant had to learn new skills and the class barrier between shopper and shop assistant crumbled. Department stores became part of the London cityscape as well as flourishing in towns and in the suburbs, offering tearooms, and hairdressing salons and in some cases a roof garden.

A Mass Observation survey found that women preferred shopping in department stores to independent clothes shops as the staff in the latter were paid on commission and therefore employed more aggressive selling techniques. As well as ready-to-wear fashion, department stores offered levels of dressmaking for different budgets, from 'Bespoke to an inexpensive in-store dressmaking service and lastly the 'Cut and Fit' department where customers could bring in their own fabric and pattern to be cut and tacked together for home sewing.

Printed dress fabrics became very popular having the practical advantage of being cheaper than embroidered fabrics as well as less likely to show stains than plain ones. Simple styles from new synthetic fabrics such as rayon, cut to fit the average body, became a sought-after choice. A shop-bought dress was for many a rite of passage into adulthood.