The Working Class has been perceived as divided, in the period after the Second World War, between those on ‘the margins’. The 1950s, when working-class women were first actively pursued as consumers for many commodities, is often seen as a period in which contradiction and class conflict was absent. It is associated with a national consensus culture brought about by affluence, which was only interrupted by the emergence/identification of marginal groups in the 1960s. The mechanism by which consumption is stimulated is often identified as ‘fashion’, or a similar conceptualisation such as ‘built-in-obsolescence’. For working-class women in the 1950s, fashion signified in terms of the skills it demanded and the pleasures it offered, and these were specific to that market. Veblen explained fashion as evidence of struggle for status in ‘a new society where old rules disintegrated and all were free to copy their betters’.
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