Forties Fashion: From Siren Suits to the New Look Paperback – April 1, 2011

This is absolutely the best book I have found on vintage fashions. I wear and collect vintage clothing. I am always looking for books that have beautiful color pictures of the actual article of clothing instead of drawings. Drawings do not show how an item hangs on a real body. This book also took the displays to the next level by adding appropriate accessories. Forties fashion is my weakness but I do love and wear 1920 thru 1960's clothing and am hopeful there will be other books like this one with such outstanding photography and design. If anyone has any suggestion please respond.

This is the 40s fashion book I've been waiting for all of my life! (At least, since I discovered this decade of style in movies and TV shows!) The color illustrations alone are fabulous and plentiful; the background information about clothes rationing, wartime textile regulations, and -- most of all -- the sheer ingenuity of everyone, from designers to style-conscious women in everyday life, during a period of great hardship -- provided the most sublime data overload. I recommend this book to anyone, anywhere, who loves clothing and the psychology of dress!

Amé este libro. Muy buenas fotos, ofrece una idea muy clara de la época. Deseaba mucho tenerlo.

This book shows the global impact of World War 2 on the fashion industry from both sides of the conflict. If your interest is only on American fashion in those years, you might not appreciate this book. With Paris fashions inaccessible, the American fashion business really had to step up and create clothing that could be manufactured under "waste-not" requirements. Re-enactors looking for German styles will find some here.

Very nice item, even better than pictured.

Not what I really wanted, I was interested in the fashions, I already know the history of the period. Some nice pictures.

While not being a particular fan of lots of clothes being `displayed' via the medium of the mannequin - no matter the period appropriateness of such - the broad use of mannequins in this book works particularly well. While viewing the contemporary fashion scene in the likes of Britain and America during WWII in publications of this nature is nothing new, the research that has gone into material for the book has certainly gone a great deal further than that of the `extra mile'. I particularly like the perspectives taken from Germany, Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Canada and even New Zealand, Australia and Japan. The even today revelation that Paris `ignored the war', and to a certain extent continued to move forward fashion's representational mode, is surprising in itself. But perhaps, the actual meaning of this is given little meaning - in terms of what physical clothing of the time looked like - in hitherto publications of this nature, in this book it is well-exampled.Given the part title of the book, and putting aside arguments as to whether what Christian Dior established with his `New Look' was a good or bad thing for women, the chapter dedicated to the post-war years is certainly not simply `a trotting-out' of the same tired old images heavily featured in other publications. As has been achieved throughout the book, fashion representation, and therefore to a large extent, women's self-defined representation of themselves at the time, is given a broader slant.A number of the material in the book comes immediately before the 1940s, emphasising the relevancies of the 1930s - and what had gone before - to what was going on in fashion - and within the world as a whole in the 1940s itself. As you would expect, and is obviously furthermore befitting, given the momentous nature of WWII, the period features heavily in this publication. Again, international aspects of wartime fashion - and how this was represented in print media of the time are particularly interesting - emphasising the international nature of the research that has gone in to the book.In essence, the goal of the book - to show women's fashion of the 1940s period from international perspectives - has been particularly well rationalised and executed in the drawing together of images and text that make this book an essential purchase to anyone interested in what fashions of the 1940s period were actually like. Rather than, for example merely being another gathering of relative glamour and well-to-do people's clothing taken from publications such as international versions of Vogue magazine. Perhaps the only criticism of the book would be the sparse representation given to men's clothing. Given what Anne Hollander suggests as a need to acknowledge developments to both men's and women's clothing, to more accurately understand either - the momentous changes happening to women's social position throughout most of `the developed world' in the first-half of the twentieth century naturally befits that fashion, image and meaning is given the rightful position as a representation of women's self-expression through clothing.

This book is a great overview on how women's fashions changed and were affected by World War II. It covers what fashions were like several countries: USA, Britain, Germany, and others. While it is not very detailed and in depth, I think this is great for general study in the topic.