Garments were entangled with victory in numerous ways, from its celebration to a deflating sense of its elusiveness. The equation of peace with prosperity proved unwarranted. British shops did not quickly refill. Civilian clothing became scarcer just after the war than at any time during it. The number of clothing coupons issued in each rationing cycle fell, frustrating hopes that the material ‘fruits of victory’ would soon be enjoyed. This chapter examines Britons’ symbolic and performative uses of clothing to celebrate victory, as well as Allied military commanders’ sartorial enactment of Axis leaders’ defeat. Surrender ceremonies and victory parades were occasions when garments were required to do particular work, whether ‘dressing up’ or ‘dressing down’. Meanwhile, in the United States, a United National Clothing Collection (launched in April 1945) sought to amass ‘victory clothing’ for distribution by UNRRA. The chapter concludes by considering transnational and imperial recalibrations of power as evidenced in Britain’s official Victory Parade in June 1946, which exposed Britons’ attitudes towards colonial subjects and the ‘colour’ they lent to national pageantry.

This chapter analyses garments in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, where clothing was a vital matter. Lice-ridden garments spread typhus, claiming hundreds of lives after the camp passed from SS to British control. Medical students and humanitarian workers, from the Red Cross, Friends Relief Service and UNRRA, worked alongside military personnel and impressed German civilians and Hungarian guards to check disease and bring Holocaust survivors ‘back to life’. Clothing was crucial to the restoration of dignity. Many survivors were naked or partially clad; those with garments often had nothing to wear but camp uniforms or plundered SS apparel. Where would sufficient garments be found to stock ‘Harrods’, as Britons nicknamed Belsen’s clothing store? Initially, clothing, shoes and bedding were levied from the German population near Belsen in a British military effort to enact retributive justice that encountered considerable resistance. The chapter also explores relationships between survivors, medical students and relief workers, as clothing and makeup ‘refeminized’ women survivors, and as Britons wrestled with ambivalence towards Jews and Jewishness.

The rapid postcolonial growth of the capital Lusaka, along with the huge expansion of the informal economy, has opened numerous developments in clothing practices and cultures of consumption. Zambians creatively make fashion their own in an increasingly globalised world where dress influences flow in multiple directions and the West no longer is the final arbiter of style. With focus on young women and men, the discussion examines the secondhand clothing market as a popular source for the fulfilment of clothing desires, while discussing the cultivation of appearances along with some of the dress dilemmas that arise from youth, gender, and location.

The social and cultural significance of dress practice and its changes is shaped by the way clothing was delivered and how it has entered people’s lives. Since the early days of the colonial encounter in what today is Zambia, imported textiles and clothing became far more than quotidian wear. Western-styled clothing became a centrepiece of consumption, a focal point of everyday life, which people localised in the process. Labour migration across the region made cities and towns into key spaces for work and consumption, enabling the development of both new clothing practices and the tailor’s craft. Men’s suits and women’s dresses were actively involved in these processes. Migrants spent a good part of their cash earnings on purchasing clothing for relatives and dependents.

African men were eager to wear long trousers and suits and they went to great lengths to obtain them. As a result of new dress sensibilities, the repertoire of tailors expanded to include garments that required more skill and attention to individual client desire in the design of suits and elaborately styled dresses.