Utility and L-85: Designing to Regulation

Most construction entries on this site are about techniques - how a thing was built. This one is about rules, because in the 1940s the most important influence on how clothes were constructed wasn't a designer or a technology but a set of government orders. If you want to understand why 1940s clothes look the way they do, this is the place to start.

In Britain, the Utility Clothing Scheme from 1941 and the Making of Civilian Clothing (Restrictions) Orders from 1942 worked together. Utility cloth and garments - labelled CC41, as the utility suit entry explains - were made to set standards and sold at controlled prices, while the restriction orders capped how garments could be made at all: a limit on the number of pleats in a skirt, the number of buttons and pockets on a garment, the width of hems, and a general ban on purely decorative extras like excess stitching, embroidery on underwear, or fur trims. In the US, the War Production Board's General Limitation Order L-85, issued in the spring of 1942, did a similar job for American manufacturers. It limited skirt hem circumferences, jacket lengths, and belt widths, and outlawed a list of fabric-hungry details: turn-back cuffs, full sleeves, patch pockets on wool garments, double yokes, and attached hoods. The aim was to save millions of yards of cloth a year without introducing clothing rationing - wedding dresses, maternity wear, and a few other categories were exempt.

For designers and home dressmakers, this changed the craft in real ways. Skirts went from gathered or circular to gored or lightly pleated, and cut to the shortest respectable length. Jackets got shorter and lost their cuffs and flaps. Interest had to come from cut rather than volume: clever seaming, contrasting yokes (cut from scraps), piecing, and topstitching. I think the best 1940s designers - Hartnell in London, McCardell and Adrian in the US - treated the rules as a brief rather than a punishment, and some of the neatest pattern-cutting of the century came out of it. L-85 was revoked in 1946, and the fabric-hungry New Look arrived the very next year. That timing is not a coincidence.