Fashion in Times of Crisis: Then and Now

 It’s the pandemic phrase repeated over and over these days: we’re in a war, we’re fighting a war. It may not be a war that’s raining down bombs and bullets, but there are strangely similar parallels to the last great conflagration of the second world war: a lethal enemy is being fought on the home front as we shelter, in families, in communities, and by heroes and heroines on the frontlines in hospitals and care homes. And meanwhile, it’s precisely the second world war generation — our grandmothers and great grandmothers who lived through it — who we’re all being called upon to protect. As the ’40s speak to current times with a startling new relevance, what that era has to teach us — about them and about ourselves — is suddenly a fascinatingly useful area to explore.

The events of the past few months now shine the strangest light on the meaning of John Galliano’s Maison Margiela spring/summer 2020: it was a collection he dedicated to the public spirit and heroic values of women and men in the second world war. Nurses’ uniforms; army, navy and airforce uniforms; images of female French resistance fighters and undercover agents — it was all there. There’s no way that Galliano, even with his zeitgeist-attuned antennae, could have known about the coming pandemic. Nevertheless, he’d hit on his inspiration for a very good reason. What we need to learn now is a bit of backbone: “Reverence for the lessons of history, and what they taught us,” as he put it. “Stories of hope, heroines and liberation are forgotten as history draws ever closer to repetition.”

Repetition? Now, maybe we're seeing that wartime public spirit flooding back in all the good ways: volunteering, activism, generosity, the at-home creativity and resourcefulness — the discovery of all the strengths none of us realised we had in us even a month ago. Overnight, the relevance to fashion is right there with us, too. From the need to wear protective clothing, to consider and love what we already own, to turn over factory and domestic sewing production to public service, to share, repair and conserve — it goes all the way through to intersecting with the bigger battle of our time, saving the planet.

“Ask yourself, how can I be of service?” were the words Phillip Lim chose when he pitched in to add his voice to a home-recorded Vogue.com video bringing news of how the CFDA/ Vogue Fashion Fund has been repurposed as A Common Thread, in support of Covid-19-affected people in the American fashion community. His stirring choice of phrase was a flag-waving example of how people in fashion — both vast conglomerates and individuals — have been rising to levels of cooperation and creative thinking that were almost unimaginable before the worldwide coronavirus emergency.

It was also a reminder of something that had dropped out of our collective memory during these past two decades of speeding overconsumption: the fact that fashion steps up to play honourable roles in times of crisis, and always has. It did so during the second world war. It did so among designers, women who volunteered, women who adapted creatively to shortages; it was there on the pages of Vogue, and in how its editors played their parts.

So if there’s ever a time to take heart from how our amazing grandmothers and great-grandmothers did it — while still caring about fashion and beauty — it’s surely now. Here are six eye-opening comparisons between then, and how we are now.

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