“Red Taffeta Under Tweed”: The Color of Post-War Clothes

Abstract

In the years following the end of the Second World War and the passing of the 1948 British Nationality Act, the language of color was gradually and steadily harnessed to ideologies of race and nation, as chromatic hue and skin color became utterly imbricated. The relationship between the colors of clothing and skin are explored first through discussion of the naming and standardization of colors from the 1930s to the 1950s by the British Colour Council before turning to an analysis of the 1959 British Film, Sapphire, and its construction of racial identities through the semantics of hue, dress and appearance. These ideas were disseminated not only through visual culture, but also through the expertise of social scientists and in journalism, popular psychology, and many forms of visual media. Choice of clothing styles and colors was believed to expose innate racial traits and preferences, defining both the restrained, neutral look of the white nation and the sexualized and dangerous excesses of the new black African and Caribbean immigrants.

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