Lucy Adlington


Great War Fashion - Tales from the History Wardrobe

"I found this a fascinating book. The style of writing is light, lively and yet very informative. The images are also wonderful and really complement the text" – Amazon review
"Fascinating! A very gripping read about clothes and culture" – Goodreads review

Imagine 'stepping into someone else’s shoes'. Walking back in time a century ago, which shoes would they be? A pair of silk sensations costing thousands of pounds designed by Yanturni of Paris or wooden clogs with metal cleats that spark on the cobbles of a factory yard? Will you shoes be heavy with mud from trudging along duckboards between the tents of a front-line hospital… or stuck with tufts of turf from a football pitch?

Great War Fashion opens the wardrobe of women in the years before the outbreak of war to explore the real woman behind the stiff mono-bosomed ideal of Edwardian Society lady, and closes it on a new breed of women who have donned trousers and overalls to feed the nation’s guns in munitions factories and who, clad in mourning, have loved and lost a whole generation of men.

The journey through Great War Fashion is not just about the changing clothes and fashions of the war years – it is a journey into the lives of women who lived under the shadow of war and were irrevocably changed by it. At times laugh-out-loud funny and at others bringing you to tears, Lucy Adlington paints a unique portrait of an inspiring generation of women, brought to life in rare and stunning images.