Fashion's Front and Back: 'Rag trade' Cultures and Cultures of Consumption in Post-war London c. 1945–1970

Abstract

This article considers some of the spatial and industrial structures associated with the making, and retailing of fashionable clothing in the West End of London between 1945 and 1970. Using Erving Goffman's notion of 'presentational behaviour' it examines the relationship between the 'back-region' activities associated with the designing, manufacturing and distribution of clothes and the 'front-region' tasks of displaying and selling them. By isolating three districts associated with various levels of London's fashion system in the 1950s and 60s (Mayfair for Couture, Marylebone for Wholesale and Soho for youth fashions) and identifying aspects of their particular cultures of production, the article offers a corrective model to those histories of post-war fashion and 'Swinging London' that have explained change by focusing exclusively on retail innovation and shifts in cultures of consumption. These developments, it is argued, also grew out of longer industrial histories that have their roots in the streets behind the great shopping thoroughfares of Bond Street, Oxford Street and Regent Street. The physical, structural and symbolic proximity existing between the hidden worlds of the workroom and the office and the more public terrain of the dress shop and the department store is thus foregrounded as a way of enriching our understanding of London's fashion scene at a crucial moment in its formation.