Photograph from ‘Vogue 100: a Century of Style’, at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 22 May, sponsored by Leon Max; ‘Lee Miller: a Woman’s War’ is at the Imperial War Museum until 23 April.

British Vogue was created as an import substitute during the first world war, set up in 1916 when copies of the American original, published since 1894, were deemed inessential cargo on ships threatened by German torpedoes. When the second world war began in 1939, Vogue imagined a rerun of 1914, with a front line in northeastern France, but with Paris couture still operating, if with difficulty because of conscription and loss of international customers. Things would continue, if not quite as normal. So during the phoney war in the winter of 1939, the magazine was not prepared to lower its standards for gracious living. It deplored women who cited the hostilities as an excuse to wear “slacks” in town.

Government regulations soon forced Vogue to print fewer copies and shrink its pages, but its tone remained unconditionally consumerist: in Paris, “everybody was living at the Ritz” and American store buyers had sailed across the Atlantic for the spring collections; in London, called-up officers married in style at short notice — one bride wrote of Harrods’s assurance that it could cater for the wedding cocktail party for six shillings a head, with no prospective dearth of champagne. Military service for women was as yet voluntary, and Vogue commissioned male writers to mock those who joined up — a young man opined that women should perform all menial labour but not brainwork, for which they were unsuited; another claimed they were incapable of responsible authority.

Entire issues passed with few war mentions other than the martial names of new lipstick shades; in May 1940 Vogue assured readers that their Riviera holidays by sleeper train were possible, though the Zone des Armées in the northeast would of course be out of bounds. There were rare ominous notes: Eric (Carl Erickson), an American fashion illustrator, drew his wife playing backgammon in the cellar of their militarised-zone home during an air raid alert, while “their Indo-Chinese servants stand with stiff respect” — one held a gasmask. Vogue features editor Lesley Blanch (1) noticed London’s “sandbags were beginning to leak, and run out, like hour glasses”.

Vogue increased its price because of a rise in paper costs “aggravated by the German invasion of Scandinavia”, but reported on seasonal parties, a dinner of salmon trout featuring as prominently as the diners, gathered round the radio for midnight news of the battle for Norway. Then, suddenly, it published an Eric drawing not, as expected, of the Paris mid-season collections, but of a column of refugees, the Ericksons among them in a ramshackle car. They had had to retreat from the sudden Nazi advance, and were strafed on the road among women with bleeding feet, their shoes worn through, pushing perambulators. Mrs Erickson heard that her village had been bombed: “The wife, mother and daughter of our butcher were killed. The butcher has gone mad.” And there it was, raw war, printed among the ads advising readers to “Invest in furs!” — ermine-worked Canadian squirrel — or stock up on tinned condensed milk.

‘Women are harsh realists’

Blanch was the first to respond; her fierce, feminist voice began to influence Vogue’s tone: “Every British woman will become a soldier,” she rebutted the mockers, because “women are harsh realists.” Everyone was now living history that would read like fiction; the walls of fortress Britain bulged with wounded, penniless refugees, so “everyone has a new set of values.” Fashion photographer and former model Lee Miller took her first action shots as bombs pattered down near British Vogue’s offices, forcing production down into the cellars: “Vogue, like its fellow-Londoners, is put to bed in a shelter.” (Fortnum & Mason’s store recommended a camel hair sleeping bag, lambswool-lined, for 14 guineas as a Christmas gift for shelterers.)

The London blitz challenged everything that Vogue had lived for and by, besides destroying the premises of its profitable dressmaking-pattern subsidiary: precious possessions — other than one piece of jewellery set with all a family’s finest stones to be carried everywhere as a portable fortune — became liabilities when “safe as houses [seemed] an obsolete phrase”. Blanch had not evacuated her own modest treasures, losing everything to a direct hit, and wrote how “snatch cases stand by our beds, hammocks [...] everyone goes round carrying suitcases”.

It was socially acceptable to arrive at friends’ houses to cadge a bath before a dinner of whatever could be scavenged, possibly cooked on an open fire. Personal maids followed household servants into the military and munitions factories, and a famous country chatelaine was down to one “adenoidal, trancey under-housemaid, rejected by more exacting employers”. Values, Blanch thought, had changed as much during 1940 as the map of Europe; the future would have to be “a new World for the Brave [like] the simple democratic countries of Scandinavia”. Cecil Beaton, photographer, theatre designer and brutal snob, was transformed into a perceptive reporter, shrewd about the laconic understatement that had replaced first world war histrionics. In an RAF operations room, he overheard a bomber crew’s last radio communication: “Plane losing height over the Alps. Love and kisses. Love and kisses.” His dispatches from the war in the air were crammed in among small ads for bespoke corsets.

The imposition of clothes rationing from 1941 seemed to free the magazine. Being fashionable went out of fashion, and Vogue, backed by the government Board of Trade, proselytised for a minimalist wardrobe of carefully-maintained tailored clothes as the measure of good class as well as correct attitude: “The woman well-dressed in the meaning of today would not be easily rendered helpless or ridiculous.” Since “it now looks wrong to look wealthy”, Vogue enthused for the scheme set up by London’s leading designers to produce “Utility” garments, made within all specified restrictions, including those on labour, and sold at controlled, fair prices.

These democratised intelligent design. Many women earning a war-work wage saved money and coupons for a durable Utility purchase, perhaps dressed up with a patriotic print scarf — “Dig For Victory” or “Home Guard”. Blanch noted that the well-off, short of servants, fuel and free time, had reduced their home life from many rooms to one, often the kitchen, and changed their eating habits from many-course, formal meals to single-pot, heavily vegetable dishes spooned from bowls, or maybe just a supper of buns from a street shelter. Staying clean, with strictly rationed soap and usually cold water, had become a luxury. Blanch despised rich shirkers who circumvented food and clothes coupons — a lady and her daughters in a Bournemouth hotel “taking another chocolate biscuit” were period pieces, “hangers-on to all the complicated pre-war standards which are just so much excess baggage today”.

‘You can trust them’

With Miller as photographer, Blanch reported on the women’s services — WRNS (navy) graduating from fearful lubbers to small-boat crew proficiency; ATS (army) training alongside the men with whom they would serve in mixed anti-aircraft batteries; WAAF (air force), working on technical developments — “the once despised bent towards mathematics and science is now prized”. Her propaganda was as much for the value of employed women, their right to work as well as a family life, as for the war effort: “You cannot hurry them or bully them,” she quoted a commanding officer, “but you can trust them.” A Vogue editorial hoped that government-funded nurseries which freed mothers to work, and the milk and school dinners which healthily supplemented children’s rations, would outlast the war. Political discussions that developed out of the conscription of Britain for total war through control of its money (purchase and income taxes), material resources and people, generally overflew the magazine; there was just one jokey mention of the policy-determining Beveridge Report.

But the altered attitudes that encouraged the report’s wide acceptance permeated every page. Be practical — go barelegged in summer (tan, dye legs with potassium permanganate) or do without more necessary stockings come winter. Be curious — grow and eat unfamiliar ingredients such as aubergines, courgettes, sorrel and mushrooms; Vogue recipes were meant for country readers, or people who could bring back unrationed produce to town, and except for the “small nut of margarine” as cooking fat, sound surprisingly like modern food. In 1943 Vogue invited the radical young architects Antony and Susan Cox to write about rebuilding post-war Britain, “clearing up a pretty mess we allowed to accumulate before any bombs fell”, sure the future had to be planned for the benefit of all. That was the moment when social democracy passed from being a political argument to being a popular fashion. When there was barely enough to go round, share everything, and queue for it.

As pre-war stocks of everything ran out in 1944 — there was an acute shortage of elastic to keep underwear up — and Britain turned into an armed camp with an invasion force to supply, goods grew ever scarcer: some fashion brand ads showed merely their labels to mark their place in the market, and Vogue explained how to repair moth-holes when cutting old garments up for children’s wear. The invented excitements of seasonal modes couldn’t compete with the thrill of new ideas. Blanch imagined a better tomorrow with “comfort regarded as a birthright for everybody, rather than a luxury for a few”. She wanted employment agencies where specialist domestic skills could be hired by the hour or day, and local depots where packages or laundry could be picked up round the clock. She was alarmed that women post-war might be “fobbed off with a pat on the back as soon as women-power is no longer at a premium”, or pass up their hard-earned equality “in a temporary fit of floozy femininity”. Boys should be “more self-supporting domestically. No one thinks it odd that a woman should earn her own living and run her own home. But it’s oh so pathetic and clever if a man does likewise.”

‘The pattern of liberation is not decorative’

Miller persuaded her fellow Americans to accredit her as a war correspondent, and sailed for France after the D-Day landings, sending back her first pictures from a field hospital in Normandy. Her reports went through long delays, so it was autumn before Vogue published, all at once, her accounts of the liberation of Paris and of the siege of St Malo, where (having taken a wrong turning in her jeep) “I was the only photographer for miles around, and I now owned a private war,” as US troops stormed its citadel with “grenades hanging on their belts like Cartier clips.” Miller had been muse to Surrealists; now she lived their art, on one spread picturing Parisian women in their Occupation-years finery (see What happened in Paris), and on the next a German surrender by ruined Loire bridges. “The pattern of liberation is not decorative,” she wrote as she advanced with the Allies from Paris, where couturiers showed their first collections in a city short of food and fuel (fabric salesmen wrapped themselves in their samples to stay warm), to battles in frozen Alsace-Lorraine, where Allied troops wrapped themselves in farmhouse lace curtains as snow camouflage.

Miller was unstoppable — on and on across Europe, washing in Hitler’s bathtub, watching his eyrie at Berchtesgaden burn, witnessing the unburied bodies of Buchenwald: her photographs of these were printed just a few centimetres square, adjacent to Ministry of Food advice on bottling rosehip syrup, and overleaf from fashion spreads of play clothes worn on English beaches cleared of barbed wire. She competed for recycled paper supplies with laments about peace without plenty, since Britain had a £1.2bn post-war trade deficit to be made good with exports at the expense of home consumption. “We are longing to sell, as you are longing to buy,” a lingerie ad read. “The export drive dictates a long wait.”

In 1945 Britain voted in a landslide for a socialist government with policies intimated by those Vogue editorials on fair-sharing, including Blanch’s welfare plea for “the idea of a basic food ration — the right of everyone to the elementary needs of life.” Vogue profiled the new Labour Party prime minister, Clement Attlee, warily but kindly. It began to explore the national future. Cotton would not be back soon because of “labour’s reluctance to return to a traditionally depressed industry with inferior working conditions and wages”, but synthetics were under development. Beaton believed that women would expand towards the buxom since a 25-year cult of extreme thinness had been rendered repugnant by images of starvation across a Europe “gnawing at its own vitals”. Radio had been the war’s medium, but the oncoming launch of television “as a medium of entertainment will eventually kill off sound broadcasting stone dead”. The working-class historian A L Rowse asked if anything could be said for the old society, and answered not much, given its capital-driven crassness, especially in architecture and social community: handsomely designed council housing was the way ahead.

However, the new leading voice after Blanch left Vogue in 1945 was far less egalitarian: Marghanita Laski (2), whose initial entry noted: “We don’t live in our kitchens any more. So everyone is talking about servants again. The cheaper press is full of interviews with ex-service girls all saying they wouldn’t dream of going back into [domestic] service.” Vogue began to feel such girls should be officially drafted back to servitude, albeit with improved living conditions, while their class betters, on leaving school, should train in catering and secretarial work: it worried whether there would be enough jobs for demobilised men. Laski was among the few Britons who soon after war’s end “could raise passports, visas, travel reservations, hotel accommodation and £75, and had rushed to the continent” — she toured France, eating there voraciously as Vogue wrote about Britain’s (Marxist) minister of food and his concern for the National Loaf, which he said was a “threatened stronghold against starvation” and was about to be rationed in a continent near famine. Laski was pleased that a spontaneous return to formality in evening dress had banished from smart London restaurants “the little typists who used to turn up [in wartime] with a little military brooch”.

Notwithstanding Britain’s post-war near-bankruptcy, there were ads promoting a future of glamour, of luxury saloon cars and BOAC and BEA airlines (forerunners of BA). A woman wielding a welding torch was offered an electric cooker on return “to the haven of her own kitchen”, a bride in a cosmetics ad promised her spouse “to cook like an angel and keep on looking as though I can’t even boil an egg”. Editorial copy began to pick up on the reviving appeal of inequality, expressed mostly through female class behaviour and appearance — women must constrict and restrict themselves, tone themselves down, be ladies again. Vogue was censorious about the freedom of wartime hatlessness, declaring that “hair had got above itself, being seen about more than is good for it (blown curls, loose manes)”; it must be tamed to sleekness, and hidden beneath costly, tricky hats. As soon as feasible, women must wear sheer stockings and white summer gloves.

Almost every month Vogue published fresh images from Paris, where the couturiers, who were backed by recovering textile manufacturers, experimented with dropped hems, widened skirts, rounded shoulder-lines, heightened heels and corseted waists. Extremes derived from anti-Occupation wear evolved into Christian Dior’s 1947 New Look, which was actually an Old Look, a modified Edwardian mode impossible to work or walk in. Although in the UK, the style was for some time only available to the few still wealthy enough after surtax, and well connected enough to evade rationing, it eventually triumphed over the practical democracy of Utility. And features about good design for all, planning and politics evaporated from Vogue’s pages