The Sweater Girl Silhouette

The "sweater girl" name comes from Lana Turner, whose brief scene walking down a street in a tight sweater in They Won't Forget (1937) got her the label almost overnight. But the silhouette really belongs to the 1940s, when the pin-up became a wartime institution and a fitted sweater became shorthand for a certain kind of wholesome-but-not-quite glamour. It sits in an interesting spot in this decade: it comes straight out of Hollywood publicity rather than couture, yet it filtered down into what ordinary young women were actually wearing almost immediately.

The garment on top is simple - a short, close-fitting knit, often short-sleeved, and very often hand-knitted, since knitting was something you could do at home with unravelled and reclaimed yarn. But the silhouette isn't really about the sweater at all. It's about the structured, stitched, forward-pointing bra underneath, which gave the bust the high, defined shape the look depends on, and the girdle keeping everything below it smooth. That's the direct ancestor of the 1950s bullet bra, and I think it's worth seeing the 1940s as the point where the sweater-and-bra combination first became a recognisable silhouette in its own right, rather than something that arrives fully formed in the next decade.

Add a high-waisted skirt or trousers, a narrow belt, and hair pinned up into rolls, and you have the look that ended up painted on bomber noses and taped inside lockers. It's worth separating that pin-up context from what the silhouette meant to the women actually wearing it, though. For a lot of them, a hand-knit sweater and a well-fitted skirt was simply one of the few ways to look put-together on a rationed budget, and the glamour was a bonus rather than the point.