Fashion during the Great War

War affects societies, their cultures and thus their fashions. In the light of the 100 year remembrance of the Great War (1914-1918), a conference in Paris and exhibition in Berlin this autumn will explore the cultural history of dress in WWI.

Coat by Mästhle Berlin,1916. Photo: Ernst Schneider, Collection Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. CC-BY-NC-SA.

On 12 and 13 December 2014, the Institut Français de la Mode in Paris  will host the conference “Fashion, Dress and Society in Europe during World War I”. The conference will explore how fashion was affected by war economies and how it played a role in shaping national identities.

Overall and possibly unexpectedly, the period of WWI proves to have been a time of amazing vitality and modernity in fashion. The attractive dresses with half-length skirts, black as a fashion colour and comfortable suits of silk jersey are only a few of the stylistic innovations presented during this conference in Paris.

The National Museums in Berlin will also explore the topic with the exhibition “Wardrobes in Wartime: Fashion images during the First World War” at the  Kulturforum in Berlin (25 September 2014 – 18 January, 2015). Overshadowed by Art Nouveau and the so-called Golden or Roaring Twenties, the period of WWI has all too often been overlooked by fashion historians.

To further illustrate the history of the Great War through the culture of fashion, Europeana Fashion has created a Pinterest board with a selection of images from the Europeana Fashion portal and other sources that give a sense of how people dressed during the Great War. We invite anyone who has suggestions for images to contact us communication@europeanafashion.com.K-12 technology where to find and buy college homework in college-homework-help.org implementations perform dramatically better than others