Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion

3. Smart Clothes at Low Prices: Alliances and Negotiations in the British Interwar Secondhand Clothing Trade

71 Celia Marshik l 3 SMART CLOTHES AT LOW PRICES Alliances and Negotiations in the British Interwar Secondhand Clothing Trade Advertisements for secondhand clothing dealers haunt the margins of British fashion periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s.Issues of Vogue and Eve report on the latest Paris models, but small notices remind contemporary readers that many women only came into contact with clothing designed by Chanel and Poiret—as well as with less august names— after other women had worn the garments and decided to sell them. Scholarship on fashion in modernity generally focuses on industrialization , mass production, and the rise of designer brands; Beverly Lemire speaks for many scholars when she asserts that secondhand apparel was only socially acceptable and widely worn before industrialization made cheaper, ready-made articles available.1 Stanley Chapman, for his part, asserts that by 1860,eighty percent of the population of Britain purchased ready-made clothing.2 Such arguments, which focus on the nineteenth century, occlude the ongoing demand for secondhand merchandise that persisted well into the twentieth century, a demand that indicates that preindustrial forms of the clothing trade quietly persisted at the edges of modernization. This trade encouraged consumption of new clothing by underwriting additional purchases.As a 1932 Vogue “Shoppers and Buyers Guide” asserted ,“here, when you are tired of your clothes and yet can’t afford to give them away, is the name of a discreet firm who will buy them from you.”3 Through such advertisements, fashion magazines catered to—or at least recognized—that their readership comprised women of varying means.4 These notices provide tantalizing glimpses of a trade in which upper-class, but not necessarily wealthy, individuals sold their clothing 72 Fashion and Relationships to women who were often further down the social scale with the assistance of a middlewoman.This trade required a complex negotiation of gender and class norms as both upper- and lower-class women needed the assistance of a woman in “trade”to make and maintain a fashionable modern appearance. This essay provides new insight into the inner workings of the secondhand clothing trade by examining the records of Robina Wallis, who ran such a business by post between 1926 and 1959.The records of Wallis’s business are now archived at theVictoria & Albert Museum’s off-site storage facility, Blythe House.5 It is difficult to ascertain how generalizable Wallis’s business model is; as Lemire writes, the secondhand trade was “largely invisible” and left “few records.”6 It was clearly operated along different lines than urban secondhand shops,which often cultivated salonstyle settings that, at their best, approximated the kinds of spaces where new clothing was sold.7 Because of its very rarity, however, the Wallis archive is worth examining in some detail for the light it sheds both on the role of the secondhand trade in the“democratization”of dress and on the class, gender, and style norms that governed women’s access to clothing. Scholars of fashion and modernity have long debated whether fashion was “democratized” in the twentieth century—whether, in other words, fashion came within the realm of all consumers and not just the elite. Christopher Breward summarizes this thesis in The Culture of Fashion: Britain between the wars has often been presented in terms of a sudden democratisation of fashionability due to advances in clothing technology, a further expansion of the publicity and advertising machine to incorporate film, radio and truly mass-circulation periodicals and a perceived broadening of employment and educational opportunities for women and the working class.8 As this account indicates, discussions of democratization have ignored the secondhand clothing trade, in part because it highlights continued disparities between privileged consumers and those with lower economic and social standing. By inserting the topic of the secondhand trade into this conversation, I suggest that the democratization thesis captures aspiration toward, rather than consumption of, interwar fashion. As I will argue, the Wallis archive demonstrates that even when women wanted to look “smart” and knew what that would require, the very fact that they negotiated deals with a trader like Wallis—and the types of deals they negotiated—serves as a reminder of the challenges many encountered when balancing their social and economic position with a desire for fashionable femininity. Marshik /The British Interwar Secondhand ClothingTrade 73 The archive also demonstrates the peculiar form of intimacy established between the trader and her...