1930s

Prescribed dress of the 1930s, across every family.

Before Flame Resistance

Wool, leather and a brass helmet. Firefighting dress before flame-resistant fibre was a bet that wool chars rather than melts, and that the helmet would take the rest.
Three nineteenth-century American leather fire helmets from different companies

Modernist Army Uniforms

Between the wars, military tailoring did what architecture was doing: stripped ornament, raised the waist, simplified the silhouette to something a factory could cut.
Three views of a First World War enlisted man's olive drab tunic