Skirts, dresses, trousers & underwear

Below you will find several pictures, all of them Dutch and all of them between 1935 and 1945. You can click on some of the pictures to see a larger version of the picture that enables you to study the details.

Skirts

Skirts in this era were usually rather common, straight down with almost no accent. The average Skirt and dress would go over the knee, skirts sometimes much longer.

Dresses

Dresses in the 1930s and 1940s usually had a basic shape, but there where many different ways designers played with this shape.
Women had dresses for every occasion (if they could afford it) in many colours and with many patterns.

 

 

 

 

 

Trousers

In the 1930s trousers were not worn by many women, it was frowned upon.
After famous women like Marlene Dietrich started wearing them, carefully other women started following her example. But even after that most women didnt wear them except for sports like sailing. Especially in conservative Holland women with trousers where rarely seen untill the late in the war, clothes where rationed and finally almost impossible to get.
Finding nice dresses was a difficult task and as the occupation progressed people started caring less about what was proper and what not. During the last months of the war you could see women wearing trousers all over Holland, although most trousers where altered mens trousers.

 

Underwear

Womens underwear in the 1930s and 1940s was very different from todays underwear, in most cases it was much sexier, retro underwear resembles modern lingerie in some cases.
There was nice and expensive underwear and the rather un-atractive cheap underwear. The first was usually made of silk and the latter of cotton or even wool!
Bloomers, knickers, panties or as we know them underpants in most cases were extremely large in our modern eyes. They had legs and would be large enough to cover your bellybutton!

Stockings didnt have any elastics so these had to be kept up somehow, this was done with a suspender belt, a rather large, often pink sort of wrap-skirt you would wrap around your waist, fasten with small hooks and this would hold the stockings with 4 or 6 clasps.