Fashioning Identities through Consumption: Clothes, Class, and Gender in the First World War Fictionalized Epistolary Column

This article explores how the fictionalized epistolary column that appeared in three illustrated magazines during the First World War linked subtle differences in relatively affluent female readers’ class identification with a set of prescribed gendered practices governing women’s wartime consumption of clothes and entertainments. While the columns appearing in The Tatler, The Sketch, and The Bystander similarly encouraged female readers to support the war effort, they did so by promoting distinct versions of gender and consumption.