Norman Hartnell

Norman Hartnell was, by the start of the war, the British royal family's go-to couturier - the designer behind Queen Elizabeth's romantic all-white wardrobe for the 1938 state visit to Paris, all crinoline-inspired skirts and embroidery. So it's a genuinely surprising turn that one of his most important contributions to the 1940s is a set of plain, fabric-rationed day clothes designed for anybody with the coupons to buy them.

In 1942 Britain's Board of Trade asked the newly formed Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers - Hartnell, Hardy Amies, Digby Morton, Edward Molyneux, and others - to design a range of garments that met the new Utility restrictions: limited fabric, limited pleats, limited buttons and trim. The point was partly practical and partly morale. If the country's top couturiers could make well-cut clothes within those limits, then Utility needn't mean dowdy. Their designs went into mass production, and the resulting utility suits and dresses are some of the best-designed ordinary clothes Britain ever produced.

Then, in 1947, he designed Princess Elizabeth's wedding dress, in ivory silk embroidered with thousands of pearls and crystals - and even the royal bride needed clothing coupons for the fabric. The government allowed her an extra ration, and members of the public sent in their own coupons to help, which had to be politely returned because transferring them was illegal. I think those two commissions, five years apart, sum up British fashion in the 1940s better than almost anything: the same designer making dignified austerity for everyone, and then the country's first real postwar fairytale, still under the ration book.