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1900s

Prescribed dress of the 1900s, across every family.

Naval Whites and the Tropics

A uniform designed in the North Atlantic and then sent somewhere it could not survive. The tropical whites are what happened when an institution had to admit the climate had won.
A seaman in white dress, a naval militia bugler, and a Second World War navy recruitment poster

Pit Clothes

Almost nothing survives. Working clothes worn to destruction are not collected, and what we have of them is mostly photographs of men standing at the top of a shaft.
Three photographs of miners: a portrait at Brookside, a close view of a uranium miner's hands, and an individual miner near Dawson

The Railwayman’s Coat

Heavy wool, high collar, company buttons. Built for standing on an open platform in February by companies that were, briefly, the largest employers on earth.
Three photographs of railway staff in uniform, Hungary, early twentieth century

The Coat Was Black First

Medicine spent most of the nineteenth century in black frock coats and changed to white in about a generation. The switch was not about hygiene. It was a claim to be a science.
A seventeenth-century physician in black, a rail of white lab coats, and a surgeon in modern scrubs

The Nurse’s Cape

Lined in a colour that identified the school, worn outdoors over a uniform designed for indoors. The cape is the only part of Victorian nursing dress that survived into living memory.
A nurse's outdoor uniform in watercolour, an American Red Cross nurse photographed in 1918, and a 1944 uniform dress