Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World

Susan L. Carruthers, author, revisits the emblematic ‘demob suits’ which British veterans received after World War II.

Against the backdrop of a global ‘textile famine’, why did Britain’s government choose to compensate ex-servicemen with garments? In a zero-sum world of scarcity, some would be clothed at other’s expense. This talk unpicks the tangled politics of postwar redress.

Eighty years after the end of World War II, the ‘demob suits’ issued to British servicemen as they exited the armed forces have become iconic. As a token of official gratitude, veterans received not just a jacket and trousers but the ‘full monty’ – a whole new wardrobe complete with raincoat, hat, shirt, collar, tie and shoes. No other nation’s veterans received such generous material rewards.

In this illustrated talk, Susan L Carruthers, author of the new Cambridge University Press book Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World, revisits these emblematic postwar garments, placing them in the wider context of a worldwide ‘textile famine’.

In 1945, as millions of people stepped out of uniform and into ‘civvies,’ clothing and footwear achieved outsized importance in Britain and around the globe. It wasn’t just service personnel who would need something new, or repurposed, to wear after the war. Millions of destitute refugees, along with survivors of Nazi camps, possessed – quite literally – nothing but the clothes on their backs. Or none at all.

As political leaders, military officers and humanitarian relief workers all recognised, garments and shoes were just as vital to the sustenance of life as shelter, food and medicine – a fundamental human right, easily overlooked in our age of superabundant, ruinously cheap fast fashion.

Why, then, did a debt-ridden British government choose to compensate servicemen with garments? And why didn’t servicewomen and colonial troops receive something comparable? In austerity Britain, clothing wasn’t just a material necessity but a symbolic currency, which some were rewarded with at others’ expense.

Susan L Carruthers is a Professor of History at the University of Warwick. She is also the author of six books, which include, most recently: Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World (Cambridge University Press, 2025), and Dear John: Love and Loyalty in Wartime America (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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