Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and Class Between the Wars

The British have always been concerned about accent, appearance and class, but at no time during the twentieth century was ‘keeping up appearances’ more important than during the 1920s and 1930s. From the impecunious youth anxious to create a favourable impression at the local tennis club dance to female office workers advised by the Daily Mail that women in business kept ‘their position partly, if not chiefly, by appearance’, we peer into the intimate lives and anxieties of the middle clas...