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"The rise of the English couture industry, and the transatlantic network that supported it during a turbulent period of depression, war, and post-war reconstruction"--
List of contents
Introduction: London Couture--Design Collaboration, Networks and Narratives 1
1 London Launches a Mode: The Development of a Mayfair Couture 17
2 Made in England: Pre-War Collaboration and the Pursuit of the American Market 67
3 "Brisk Action on the Mayfair Front": The War Years and the Creation of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers 109
4 London Can Make It: The Post-War Reconstruction of a Fashion Centre 161
Conclusion: The "Top Ten"--The Most Exclusive Professional Body in Britain 221
Appendix 235
Archival Sources 239
Notes 247
Index 301
About the author
Michelle Jones is a design historian and Senior Lecturer at Central St. Martins, University of the Arts, London, and the Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts.
Summary
How design collaboration, networks, and narratives contributed to the establishment of a recognized English couture industry in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1930s and 1940s, English fashion houses, spurred by economic and wartime crises, put London on the map as a major fashion city. In this book, Michelle Jones examines the creation of a London-based couture industry during these years, exploring how designer collaboration and the construction of specific networks and narratives supported and shaped the English fashion economy. Haute couture—the practice of creative made-to-measure womenswear—was widely regarded as inherently French. Jones shows how an English version emerged during a period of economic turbulence, when a group of designers banded together in a collective effort to shift power within the international fashion system.
Jones considers the establishment of this form of English design practice, analyzing the commercial, social, and political factors that shaped the professional identity of the London couturiers. She focuses on collaborative activity that supported this form of elite, craft-based fashion production—from the prewar efforts of the Fashion Group of Great Britain to the wartime establishment of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers, modeled loosely after French fashion’s governing body, the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne.
It was these collective efforts by couturiers that established and sustained London’s place as an internationally recognized center for creative fashion.
