6 thoughts on “Lady Chatterley’s Wardrobe

  1. I have read the book. One of the things that stayed with me about Connie from it, was that she was described as ‘frumpy’ and ‘old fashioned’ several times – very twinset-and-pearls in amongst on the bright young things of the 20s. So I can only think that clothes which are 5 years out of date for the period is an attempt to reference that. The clothes are simply too nice and well-kept to hint at poverty meaning she couldn’t update her wardrobe. I know that in the book Connie doesn’t care about what she wears as she’s effectively cut off from society, a carer for her sick husband, and has largely withdrawn from the world.

    That said, this was a nice production without some of the stuff from the books and the earlier production that made me cringe.

    1. INTERESTING. As I said, I haven’t read the book. I don’t see Connie as a frumpy character AT ALL in either adaptation (this one or the Sean Bean one), so that’s a good thing to know. HMMM.

  2. Also, WWI brought on heavy rationing, as bad as WWII and then some, and there was the influenza pandemic at the end of the war, too. It was rather a dark time in many ways.

    There’s a Swedish writer called Elin Wägner, who worked as a journalist and produced several feminist novels from the early 1900’s and onwards. She wrote a lovely and rather bleak story in 1919, Kvarteret Oron, Stormy Corner in English, about an upper class woman with a mentally disabled son whose husband drinks himself to death towards the end of the war, leaving her at the very beginning of the novel with a large house that she loves but can’t afford to keep, unless – plot twist – she somehow manages to sell the huge amounts of alcohol the husband has stashed away on the black market.

    Everything is rationed, not least alcohol. Since this is at the beginning of the most restrictive period of the Swedish alcohol regulation system, alcohol is only sold subject to strict governmental rules, and it’s pretty much impossible to get hold of, anyway. An amount of this size should be handed in to the government, no compensation, but there is a huge demand and it’s worth a fortune on the black market. As a single woman it’s very hard for her to broker an illegal sale, though, she would risk prosecution and personally, she would mostly like to pour it all out. Her first priority is to keep her disabled son in the expensive nursing home he lives and feels safe in, though, so the money must at least be weighed against the risks. So she puts the house up for sale, gets a job, for the first time in her life, moves into a dingy apartment shared with a group of other single working women, barely makes ends meet and battles with her conscience.

    That novel really brought home the facts of WWI rationing for me. Another interesting tidbit is that at least in the US and Great Britain, wool and linen were heavily rationed, as they were used by the war industry (uniforms and airplanes), but silk, while expensive, was not (parachutes were thought to make pilots cowardly and not used, no really), so women were encouraged to wear more silk, even for daytime. That explained why there are so many weirdly extravagant-looking extant silk daytime ensembles, fashion illustrations and patterns suggesting silk for daywear from WWI, I always found that odd.

    Anyway; comparatively old-fashioned looks kinda make sense in 1919, up to a point.

    1. Interesting, thanks! I wasn’t surprised by Lady Chatterley’s slightly dated look, just more that she paired that with bobbed hair. It’s my understanding that it’s only super artsy, Greenwich Village types that would do so pre-1920ish.

      1. Yes, that’s true. 1910’s fashion icon Irene Castle cut off her hair right before the outbreak of WWI because of an illness or accident, can’t remember the details. Apparently it wasn’t intentional, anyway, and well before it became a fashion, but she turned lemons into lemonade and made it look good. It was probably still very fashion-forward and possibly shocking years into the 1920’s. We used to have a long braid that the youngest of my great-grandmother’s two sisters, born in 1901, supposedly cut off and had made into a hairpiece that she used for updos in the early 1920’s, because their parents would have had a fit.

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