Wednesday, January 27, 2010

20th Century Fashion: Wedding guests in 1939

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My maternal grandparents married in July 1939, just before the start of Churchill's Phoney War, at the Collegiate Church of St Mary in Warwick. They had three children, two boys and my mother who was born days before VJ Day in 1945. The marriage didn't last much beyond the production of their three children; they both remarried, granny twice more.

These photographs are from the official wedding album. What I love about them isn't just the minx-y expression on granny's face and her perfect pose for the cameras, (and goodness she loved the camera), it's the photographs of the guests in their dressing up clothes. My familiarity with authentic clothes from that era is limited to sketches from the Paris shows, pieces in museums and photographs of actresses or celebrities, so it's wonderful to see normal people caught in time.

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The rest of the photographs are on the LLG Flickr archive here