The Siren Suit

The siren suit is exactly what the name promises: something you could get into in seconds when the air-raid siren went off in the middle of the night. It's a one-piece garment, essentially a loose boiler suit or jumpsuit with long sleeves, a front zip or buttons, and often an attached hood, roomy enough to pull straight on over pyjamas or a nightdress before heading down to the shelter.

Its most famous wearer was Winston Churchill, who had several made - including a velvet one - and wore them for years, but women took to them in large numbers during the Blitz of 1940-41 and after. Department stores sold them, fashion magazines featured them, and the better-off could buy versions in soft wool or even fur-trimmed designs. More often they were made at home from a commercial pattern out of whatever warm fabric was available. There's something I find quite moving about the way women treated them: even a garment designed for sitting out a bombing raid in a cold, crowded shelter got colour, tailoring, and a bit of pride put into it.

The siren suit also sits neatly alongside the slacks silhouette and the overalls women wore for war work as part of the decade's broader normalising of women in trousers and one-piece garments. It's a direct ancestor of the jumpsuit, too - I'd trace a line from here to the 1970s jumpsuit, which took the same one-piece idea in a very different, far more glamorous direction thirty years later.