Dressing on the Ration: How the Clothes Rationing Worked
Part 1 of a series exploring how clothing rationing transformed British life and fashion during World War 2
I’ve long been fascinated by historical fashion, so it’s probably not a surprise that eventually I would decide to write a historical novel set in the world of fashion. That book is The Dressmakers of London, and the story centers around two estranged sisters who inherit their mother’s struggling dress shop, Mrs. Shelton’s Fashions, in the Maida Vale neighborhood of London.
Because so much of this book focuses on the day-to-day running of a dress shop and the pressures that wartime rationing put on a business like Mrs. Shelton’s, I knew when I started to write the book that I was going to have to go deep down the rabbit hole of research related to “fashion on the ration.” Fortunately, I found many great resources, and I thought I’d share some of that research with you.
I found as I began to write this article that there was a lot I wanted to share. The article started to get rather long, so I’ve decided to break it up into several parts, which I will share across the next few weeks.
Wardrobes Before the War
I love clothes and always have. I enjoy the creativity that goes into dressing, and I find that, much like makeup, clothing can be a wonderful form of self-expression. I also, like many people who enjoy clothes, think quite a bit about how much clothing I own.
As I began to research The Dressmakers of London, I found myself fascinated by what a woman’s wardrobe would have looked like before the war. In her wonderful book Fashion on the Ration, historian Julie Summers lays out an all-season wardrobe by the numbers. In the late 1930s, the average woman1 might have owned:
7 dresses
2 two-piece suits
2 skirts
3 overcoats
1 macintosh
5-6 pairs of shoes
Stockings, hats, gloves, and undergarments
These clothes might have come from a department store or a smaller dress shop. A woman might have had some or all of her clothes made for her by a dressmaker or—if she could afford it—one of the London or Paris fashion houses.
One great difference between then and now is the durability of clothing. There was no fast fashion as we know it today. Clothes made before the war would have been constructed with an expectation that they would last season after season. Generally, the quality would have been higher, and with that the expectation that a woman would wear her clothes for much longer than we do today.
The Ration Comes In
The declaration of war in September 1939 immediately changed fashion. Many clothing manufacturers pivoted their focus to begin producing things like the incredible number of uniforms required by the British military. Fabric such as silk, which was used to make parachutes, became unavailable for purchase. Because of the pressures on the fashion industry, it became difficult for some people to afford or access new clothing, particularly if they were less well-off.
These changes were among the factors that prompted the Board of Trade and its president Oliver Lyttleton to introduce clothing rationing. Rationing was meant to more equally distribute clothing to the British population, save valuable resources like cloth and labor, and improve the clothing that people did have.
Food rationing had been in place since 1940, but clothing rationing was only introduced on June 1, 1941. The Board of Trade announced it before a bank holiday so retailers could be properly briefed and prepared when the shops reopened to customers. This also meant that consumers couldn’t panic buy and stock up before clothing rationing began.
How It All Worked
Everyone in Britain had already been issued food ration coupon books before the clothing ration came in, so the Board of Trade instructed people to use their remaining margarine coupons toward their clothing. (They were then issued a separate coupon book for 1942-1943, no margarine coupons necessary.)
Each type of clothing someone might wish to buy was assigned a point value, which would correspond to the number of coupons you would have to surrender along with your money to purchase a garment. For instance, when rationing first started you might need:
11 coupons for a dress
2 coupons for stockings
5 coupons for women’s shoes
7 coupons for men’s shoes
Initially, most people were allocated 66 coupons for the year.2 This British Pathé film shows how it all added up.
(Fair warning that the video really feels like a relic of its time after :43)
If you think 66 coupons for an entire year’s worth of clothes feels tight, you’re right. Those men and women who had extensive wardrobes before the war could rely on rotating through their clothing to make it last longer. However, the average person would soon have to face difficult decisions about what to prioritize as their clothes wore out. People struggled, especially when trying to decide whether to buy a summer dress now or save those coupons for the purchase of a higher-value item like a coat to replace one that was falling apart later in the year.
Things only became more difficult because the number of coupons issued shrunk during the war. Here’s a look at how rationing became even more restrictive throughout the war:
1941: 66 coupons per person
1942: 48 coupons per person
1943: 36 coupons per person
1945: 24 coupons per person
Unfortunately, the dwindling number of coupons was not the only thing people had to contend with…
Look out for part 2 next week when I’ll be diving into the various government schemes to encourage people to make do with the clothing they had during World War 2 and how they changed the look of British fashion.
My book The Dressmakers of London, a novel about two estranged sisters who are forced back together when they unexpectedly inherit their mother’s London dress shop during World War 2, is now available in print, ebook, and audiobook. Further information is available on my website.
It is probably obvious but bears noting that this is a hypothetical average woman. There were wealthy women with extensive wardrobes that would have easily surpassed this. There were also women who were less well-off who would have made do with much less.
Children were given more to account for the fact that they were still growing.
Fascinating! I had learned a bit about this from The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle by Jennifer Ryan.
I have just finished The Dressmakers of London and thoroughly enjoyed it! It kept my attention from the start and I wished it hadn’t ended.