German occupation of France meant limited communications and hardly any travel at all between the US and France.  That made things difficult for US-based fashion designers who were used to traveling to Paris to copy the latest 40s fashion designs.  Suddenly, they were on their own and American (US) fashion designers had to develop their own styels.  The American ready to wear style evolved out of this severance from Paris, and from the necessities of wartime era fashion restrictions and influence in general of the War on every aspect of life in the mid 1940s.

Women were working in factories doing manual labor…like drilling holes as in the picture here.  This is a bona fide picture of a real Rosie the Riveter in action.  She is wearing a sturdy, utilitarian uniform that allows her to climb ladders and do other physical things safely and easily.  However, the uniform is very cute!  Notice the puffed sleeves and tailored waist with awesome side buttons.  And she’s wearing perfect makeup.

Women working in factories also had to keep their hair out of the way, hence the big head scarf trend in 40s fashion.  Hats, hair nets, scarves…all popular not only in the factory but also in street clothing.  There just wasn’t a whole lot of extra time for doing one’s hair in those wartime days of the mid-1940s.

Of course any style of clothing that made it easy to wear in many different ways was essential.  The 1940s utility suit was that: you could wear the skirt alone with a blouse or you could wear the whole suit, etc.  In Britain, the jacket couldn’t be double breasted (waste of cloth), the collar had to be a single one (same reason…actually the whole style of the utility suit was based on scrimping on cloth).

The picture here is great: it’s a modern-day model wearing a utility suit made from an authentic vintage pattern of a utility suit (thanks Vogue Patterns & Mccall).  Take a look at the suit: the skirt is right around the knee: too long and that would be a waste of fabric.  The cuffs just end: no fabric-wasting rolled back cuffs allowed!  The collar is small and the suit jacket just barely meets itself to cover the woman’s front.  You can see by the collar that there’s not much overlap of fabric where the buttons come together.  Of course we have the shoulder pads, a staple of 40s fashion.

Colors were limited too, since even fabric dye was rationed.  The utility suit cold be worn for everyday outings or it could be dressed up to go out to dinner in, like the model in the green suit picture.

Let me remind you, that’s over eighty years ago!!  Christian Dior defined 40s fashion after World War II by popularizing clothing that highlighted the extreme hourglass figure.  His signature hourglass designs were popular in the 1940s and into the 1950s and nobody could come close to the success of Dior in dominating the couture of that era.

His hourglass dresses were called the New Look, which defined 40s fashion after World War II.  There were several variations on the New Look, but he switched from this definer of 40s fashion in 1954, when he took fashion in a new direction and the great era of 40s fashion then suddenly came to an end.