Representations of fashionable femininity have multiplied throughout the 20th century, with complex versions of feminine identity being found in fashion store advertising, magazines, photography, and museum collections. This book examines the relationship between women's fashion, female representation and femininity in Britain throughout the 1900s. The authors unpick the dynamics of the fashion system and set fashion into the context of British social life, using the oral history accounts of women of all classes to highlight the meanings of particular fashions.

Cheryl Buckley is Professor of Fashion and Design History at the University of Brighton, UK. Her other books include Designing Modern Britain (2007), the co-authored Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women's Fashion from the Fin de Siècle to the Present (2002), and Potters and Paintresses: Women Designers in the Pottery Industry, 1870-1955 (1990).