Before you ask, I know absolutely nothing about fashion. Then why do a piece on fashion in World War II? I hear you say.
There is no particular reason, but after all the heavy subjects I usually explore, I decided to go with a more lighthearted one for a change, while still staying on the subject of World War II.
The picture above: Bath and beach fashion. Swimwear from Germany. One-piece swimsuit in a fabric with a herringbone pattern. The low back is closed with a cord. 28 April 1942.
Shoe fashion. Women’s high-heeled shoes in black patent leather and side closure with buckle. Black suede trim. The shiny stockings are made of fil d’écosse (shiny cotton yarn). The Netherlands, 14 March 1941.
A Japanese department store where every sort of Japanese-designed goods were sold.
France. Hair fashion 1940. The blond hair is undulated with strokes on the sides. Coiffure Jean Pierre.
Germany. Hair fashion 1941. The blond hair is undulated and fastened at the back with a decorative pin. 28 November 1941.
Shop window clothing repair Hollandia. With examples of how broken you can bring the underwear and how you can get it back repaired. The Maastricht skyline is visible in the shop window, including the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk from the apse to the west work. From this, it can be concluded that this shop was located on the east bank, in Wyck. Location possible at Cortenplein.
Girls of the fashion studio Gomperts en Lezer at the Oudezijds Voorburgwal 127-129 in Amsterdam, 1942-1943. I believe this was a Jewish fashion studio.
This photo is part of the collection of Emmy Andriesse (1914-1953), one of the most renowned photographers in the Netherlands. After completing her studies, she moved to Amsterdam, where she started working as a photographer. Andriesse supplied many photos to newspapers and magazines that were characterized by the use of surprising camera angles and a preference for diagonal image construction. The subjects were crafts, landscapes and the lives of adults and children in towns and villages. She was able to do this until the so-called “Journalists’ Decree” of the German occupier in 1941. As a Jewish woman, she could not work or publish and had to go into hiding. At the end of 1944, an anthropologist friend Arie de Froe arranged a forged Aryan declaration for her and she was able to participate in public life again. She joined the illegal photographers collective “De Ondergedoken Camera.” The photos Andriesse took of the Hunger Winter in Amsterdam under difficult circumstances are among the most disturbing in her portfolio. Ending this piece with one of those pictures by Emmy.
The English rock band, The Kinks once sang, “He is a dedicated follower of fashion” and I can assure you, I am not that. However, there are people working in the fashion industry, be it as designers, manufacturers or models, who often do not know the history of the brands they represent. On the other hand, there are people, who will buy a fashion item, regardless of the amount on the price tag, because of the brand name—not realizing how that particular brand got where it is now. If people really knew or cared, they would buy other fashionable brands. Several fashion houses were in bed with the Nazi regime all over Europe, but specifically in France. During the war, fashion brands were boosted on the backs and lives of others. I will only focus on a few.
The picture on top is of Renee Puissant, daughter of Jewish parents Alfred van Cleef and Esther Arpels, who made her way to the Nazi-backed Vichy regime in the south of France to operate the Van Cleef & Arpels boutique there, only to commit suicide by throwing herself out of a third-floor window when she understood the law requiring all Jews to wear a yellow star would apply to her too. Her suicide was beneficial to the Louis Vuitton fashion house. The sad thing is that there is hardly any mention of her suicide.
During World War II, Louis Vuitton collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation of France. The French book Louis Vuitton, A French Saga, authored by French journalist Stephanie Bonvicini and published by Paris-based Editions Fayard[15] tells how members of the Vuitton family actively aided the Vichy government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain and increased their wealth from their business affairs with the Germans. The family set up a factory producing artefacts dedicated to glorifying Pétain. This included the most damaging allegation, that more than Pétain 2,500 busts had been produced, a fact not mentioned in any of its business records.
From historical archives, she discovered that Louis Vuitton had a store on the ground floor of a fabulous property, the Hotel du Parc in Vichy, where Pétain set up his puppet government. While the other shopkeepers, including the jewellers Van Cleef & Arpels, were shut down, Vuitton was the only one allowed to stay.
Bonvicini interviewed surviving family members and found Vuitton’s grandson, Gaston, the wartime head of the company, had instructed his eldest son, Henry, to forge links with the Pétain regime to keep the business going.
Henry, a regular at the local cafe frequented by the Gestapo, was one of the first Frenchmen to be decorated by the Nazi-backed government for his loyalty and efforts for the regime.
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was at the top of the league in haute couture, creating the fashion look for the modern woman. By the 1920s, she had amassed a fortune and continued growing her empire. But her life from 1941 to 1954 has long been shrouded in rumours and mystery, never clarified by Chanel or her many biographers. Historian Hal Vaughan exposed the truth of her wartime collaboration and her long affair with the playboy Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage—who ran a spy ring and reported directly to Goebbels. Vaughan pieced together how Chanel became a Nazi agent, how she escaped arrest after the war and joined her lover in exile in Switzerland, and how—despite suspicions about her past—she was able to return to Paris at age seventy and rebuild the iconic House of Chanel.
So next time, when you put that bottle of Chanel No 5, back in your Louis Vuitton handbag, think of the history of those two items.
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There are very few items of fashion that please both women and men. The Bikini would be one of them, women like to wear them and men like to look at them, although nowadays some men wear them too, why? I do not know.
The bikini was born at a Paris poolside photo shoot on July 5, 1946, a week before Bastille Day and in the midst a global textile shortage. The designer, former automobile engineer Louis Réard, hired the only model willing to expose so much model, a 19-year-old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris named Micheline Bernardini. She put on the four small patches he had strung together and showed the fashion world the female belly button.
Benardini agreed to model, on 5 July 1946, Louis Réard’s two-piece swimsuit, which he called the bikini, named four days after the first test of an American nuclear weapon at the Bikini Atoll.
However Réard’s bikini was not the first 2 piece bathing outfit . For that we have to go back to about 5800 bc.
In the Chalcolithic era, the mother-goddess of Çatalhöyük, a large ancient settlement in southern Anatolia, was depicted astride two leopards while wearing a bikini-like costumes Two-piece garments worn by women for athletic purposes are depicted on Greek urns and paintings dating back to 1400 BC.[ Active women of ancient Greece wore a breastband called a mastodeton or an apodesmos, which continued to be used as an undergarment in the Middle Ages. While men in ancient Greece abandoned the perizoma, partly high-cut briefs and partly loincloth, women performers and acrobats continued to wear it.
In Coronation of the Winner, a mosaic in the floor of a Roman villa in Sicily that dates from the Diocletian period (286–305 AD), young women participate in weightlifting, discus throwing, and running ball games dressed in bikini-like garments.
Even in the modern era that there had been two piece swimsuits. Actresses like Jayne Mansfield had been wearing two-piece bathing suits, But never with the navel showing. That was deemed to be scandalous .
Bernardini modeled the bikini on July 5 at the Piscine Molitor. The bikini was a hit, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.
Before long, bold young women in bikinis were causing a sensation along the Mediterranean coast. Spain and Italy passed measures prohibiting bikinis on public beaches but later capitulated to the changing times when the swimsuit grew into a mainstay of European beaches in the 1950s. Réard’s business soared, and in advertisements he kept the bikini mystique alive by declaring that a two-piece suit wasn’t a genuine bikini “unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.”
The bikini has spawned many stylistic variations. For example the Monokini.
A monokini, more commonly referred to as a topless swimsuit and sometimes referred to as a unikini, is a women’s one-piece swimsuit equivalent to the lower half of a bikini.
In 1964, Rudi Gernreich, an Austrian fashion designer, designed the original monokini in the US. Gernreich also invented its name, and the word monokini is first recorded in English that year.
Despite the bikini’s initial success in France, worldwide women still stuck to traditional one-piece swimsuits. Below a picture of an Italian police officer issuing a woman a ticket for wearing a bikini on an Italian beach, 1957.
The bikini was banned from beaches and public places on the French Atlantic coastline, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Australia, and was prohibited or discouraged in a number of US states.
The Vatican declared it sinful. The United States Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, enforced from 1934, allowed two-piece gowns but prohibited the display of navels in Hollywood films.
Increasingly common glamour shots of popular actresses and models on either side of the Atlantic played a large part in bringing the bikini into the mainstream. During the 1950s, Hollywood stars such as Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Elizabeth Taylor, Tina Louise, Marilyn Monroe, Esther Williams, and Betty Grable took advantage of the risqué publicity associated with the bikini by posing for photographs wearing them—pin-ups of Hayworth and Williams in costume were especially widely distributed in the United States.
By the end of the 20th century, the bikini had become the most popular beachwear around the globe.
Now that bikinis have become a normal part of summer wardrobes, we have to tackle the next discussion of who is “allowed” to wear them. An international conversation has been taking place over the internet and within the fashion industry surrounding inclusivity and representation of all bodies, not just some. In my humble opinion women should be allowed what they want to wear whatever it is. However I still have issues with man wearing bikini type of fashion garments. the so called ‘mankini’ made popular by Borat.
Who would have ever imagined though, that something so destructive as an atom bomb would become the inspiration of something so beautiful as the bikini.
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Haute Couture fashion is not something you would associate with Auschwitz, yet there were about 23 women who worked as dressmakers, producing dresses and haute couture fashion.
These female prisoners served as the staff of the “Upper Tailoring Studio,” a private dressmaking shop for the wives of SS officers stationed at the facility. They were chosen for their skills, or because they had connections with existing dressmakers.
The names of only a few women are known. One of those women was Alida Vasselin(nee Delasalle-pictured above). she was a French communist, a member of the French resistance and a a corsetière. She was arrested arrested in 1942 for hiding anti-Nazi leaflets in the corsets she sewed.
Another French communist resistance member was Marie-Louise Colombain, who was also set to work as a dress maker.
Both women survived the war. Alida died on April 28, 1986,and Marie died on December 17, 1998.
The Auschwitz commandant’s wife, Hedwig Hoess, had first employed two local Polish seamstresses to sew in her villa overlooking the concentration camp. Hedwig referred to the life in the villa as “paradise”. where she could indulge in luxury items.
These included fabrics and fashions selected from the vast amount of plundered goods which was being in warehouses in the camp,only a short distance from her flower garden. The prisoners carried out the sorting of goods, would often come across belongings of their own murdered relatives. The wives of other SS officers and also some of the female guards grew envious of Hedwig’s wardrobe, Hedwig then decided to open the elite dressmaking workshop – the Upper Tailoring Studio – inside the camp itself.
One of the Auschwitz seamstresses, a Slovakian dressmaker named Lulu Gruenberg, had difficulties controlling her resentment at the indifference and arrogance of the women for whom she was making clothes to survive.
It is said that one time when Hedwig Hoess came for a fitting with one of her young sons and while his mother’s back was turned, Lulu looped a tape measure around the boy’s neck like a noose and whispered, ‘Soon you are going to hang; your father, your mother and all the others’,” according to Lucy Adlington, the fashion historian who uncovered the facts about the ‘Tailoring studio’
The seamstresses were forced to produce two outfits per client a week. They created new designs, and altered high-quality clothes brought into Auschwitz by Jewish deportees. Many SS clients ordered beautiful evening gowns in fashionable styles, to be worn on social occasions like dinner parties, music concerts and cinema visits. None of the women had any issues wearing the gowns of murdered innocent women, or clothes created by enslaved prisoners.
For the 23 seamstresses it was at least a small chance to survive.Although they were not immune to beatings and harsh treatments outside the studio. How many women survived I don’t know.
Hedwig Hoess re-married in Germany and immigrated to the USA, where she died on 15 September 1989 (aged 81)
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I think mostly everyone has heard of the name Dior. The fashion house Dior is one of the most successful fashion houses in the world.
However there is a darker history behind the name and on the other hand also a tale of heroism is connected to the name. Especially the family’s history during WWII is a complicated one.
In 1937 Christian Dior was working for the designer Robert Piguet, but in September 1939 he was called up for military service because if the declaration of war.
Luckily enough for him, his unit was not in the path of the German advance in May and June 1940 and he and his unit were demobilized quite soon after the French-German armistice on June 22nd, 1940. He stayed in the unoccupied of France for a while and did not return to Paris until 1941.
In 1942 he joined the fashion house Lucien Lelong, where he worked closely together with legendary designer Pierre Balmain.
Dior designed dresses for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators. Looking at that now it is easy to be judgmental about his fraternizing with the enemy,but other designers like Jean Patou, Jeanne Lanvin, and Nina Ricci did the same, people did what they felt they had to do to survive. They also wanted to ensure that the couture would remain in Paris
On the other hand there was Christian’s younger sister, Catherine Dior. In 1941 she joined “Massif Central’, a Resistance network which was set up in the summer of 1940. by Polish military intelligence officers in exile in France. and were focused on gathering and transmitting intelligence about German troop movements and weapon production.Catherine had joined them as a courier. which was extremely dangerous.
In June 1944 she was caught and arrested by the Carlingue, the French members of the Gestapo sometimes referred to as Gestapistes. After Catherine was tortured by the Carlibgie she was put on one of the last trains out of Paris, which departed on August 15, just days before the liberation of the city, her destination was Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Between the time of her arrest and the time of her deportation, Christian tried to seek release for his sister, via the Nazi contacts he made at his job and also via the Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling, who mediated in the release of prisoners in the past. Unfortunately the efforts bore no fruits.
But fate was in Catherine’s favor ,she had been put to work in a munitions factory in the camp and survived the war. She was liberated in April, 1945 and returned to Paris the following month.
After the was she received the Croix de Guerre, the Combatant Volunteer Cross of the Resistance, the Combatant’s Cross, the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom (from Britain), and being named a chevalière of the Légion d’Honneur.
Catherine also publicly distanced herself from the daughter of her other brother Raymond. Françoise Dior after the niece married Colin Jordan, a British Neo-Nazi leader.
In November, 1952, Catherine was called to testify against 14 former members of the Carlingue before a military tribunal in Paris.Catherine helped to preserve her brother Christian’s legacy after his death in 1957, she was involved with the opening of the Dior Museum in Granville. Catherine died in 2008.
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There is a popular misconception that Hugo Boss was the designer of the SS uniforms. Instead, artist and Senior SS Officer Karl Diebitsch cooperated with graphic designer Walter Heck to design the uniforms, which revolved around an older uniform design with few alterations.
However, it was Hugo Boss, who received the lucrative order to produce the uniforms. He had been a member of the Nazi party since 1931. By 1933, he could factually advertise that he made clothes—not only for the SS—but also for the Hitler Youth and the SA. His relationship with the Nazis made him a very wealthy man.
During the war, it was difficult for companies to find employees. and Hugo Boss made the decision to use forced labour. The company had approximately 140 Polish and 40 French forced labourers. Even though Boss’ factory wasn’t part of a concentration camp, his labourers were not considered prisoners, but the conditions were dreadful.
It would have been relatively easy and cheap for Hugo Boss to make life for his workers more bearable, but he chose not to. The food was insufficient, given the hours they had to work. During air raids, the workforce was not allowed into shelters but had to stay in the factory. Also, there were no special treatments offered to children and pregnant women.
The most poignant story that indicates how desperate the workers felt is that of Josefa Gisterek, a Polish woman. She was sent to work at Boss in October 1941. In December, she ran back home to give her father a helping hand to raise her siblings, but she was captured by the Gestapo and transported to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, where they beat her.
Hugo Boss found out where she was and used his contacts in the Nazi party to have her returned to Metzingen. Why he did this is unclear, maybe he felt he had some responsibility for his workforce, but I doubt that.
When Josefa returned, the factory foreman worked her mercilessly, which resulted in a breakdown.
After that, Josefa was given a three-month leave and allowed to see a doctor. However, on 5 July 1943, she committed suicide. Hugo Boss probably felt some guilt. He paid the funeral expenses and travel costs for her family to attend.
Although this might have appeared to be a noble gesture—had Hugo Boss treated his workforce more humanely, Josefa would not have fled in the first place.
Hugo Boss died after the war in 1948. His company went on to become one of the largest fashion houses in the world. To this day, it is still a multi-billion dollar company.
Hugo Boss died in 1948 but his company became one of the biggest fashion houses in the world and to this day is still a multi-billion dollar company.
That is something I cannot wrap my head around or comprehend. For example, if you examine the life of Oskar Schindler, you will find he died a poor man. All that remains of his company is a museum. But companies like Boss, VW, C&A and BMW, which participated in the atrocities during World War II—became mega companies. How is this even possible?
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Just to prove my versatility as a blogger I have decided to do a blog on fashion accessories. Had you there for a moment, I have absolutely no clue about fashion.But in this day where there are more and more accounts of sexual harassment I discovered that in the late 19th,early 20th century women had a particular way to deal with it.
Hatpins were sometimes used by women to defend themselves against assault by men.
Laws were passed in 1908 in America that limited the length of hatpins, as there was a concern they might be used by suffragettes as weapons. Also by the 1910s, ordinances were passed requiring hatpin tips to be covered so as not to injure people accidentally.
Around the turn of the 20th century, advertising was on the rise, which meant advertisers were targeting women with an array of consumer goods. Among them? Hats. Huge, elaborate hats perched atop even more huge, elaborate hairstyles were the must-have item of the day. The towering monstrosities were crafted from taffeta, silk, ribbons, flowers (real and fake), feathers (some birds were hunted nearly to extinction for hat feathers), birds , and even artificial fruit.
As you can imagine, ladies required some special hardware in order to affix these fashionable items to their silky tresses.Hence the hatpin
If you’re picturing those cardboard sheets of hairpins you can buy by the hundred at the drug store, think again. The 20th century hatpin was nothing short of a weapon – it was made of sturdy metal and could be up to 9 inches long (or longer, depending on the style(of course the perception of 9 inch for men differs then that from women)
This is just one account of how women resorted to this fashion accessory as a means of self defence.
‘On the afternoon of May 28, 1903, Leoti Blaker, a young Kansan touring New York City, boarded a Fifth Avenue stagecoach at 23rd Street and settled in for the ride. The coach was crowded, and when it jostled she noticed that the man next to her settled himself an inch closer to her. She made a silent assessment: elderly, elegantly dressed, “benevolent-looking.” The horse picked up speed and the stage jumped, tossing the passengers at one another again, and now the man was touching her, hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder. When he lifted his arm and draped it low across her back, Leoti had enough. In a move that would thrill victim of modern-day subway harassment, she reached for her hatpin—nearly a foot long—and plunged it into the meat of the man’s arm. He let out a terrible scream and left the coach at the next stop.
“He was such a nice-looking old gentleman I was sorry to hurt him,” she told the New York World. “I’ve heard about Broadway mashers and ‘L’ mashers, but I didn’t know Fifth Avenue had a particular brand of its own…. If New York women will tolerate mashing, Kansas girls will not.”
Newspapers across the country began reporting similar encounters with “mashers,” period slang for lecherous or predatory men (defined more delicately in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie as “one whose dress or manners are calculated to elicit the admiration of susceptible young women”). A New York City housewife fended off a man who brushed up against her on a crowded Columbus Avenue streetcar and asked if he might “see her home.” A Chicago showgirl, bothered by a masher’s “insulting questions,” beat him in the face with her umbrella until he staggered away. A St. Louis schoolteacher drove her would-be attacker away by slashing his face with her hatpin. Such stories were notable not only for their frequency but also for their laudatory tone; for the first time, women who fought back against harassers were regarded as heroes rather than comic characters, as subjects rather than objects. Society was transitioning, slowly but surely, from expecting and advocating female dependence on men to recognizing their desire and ability to defend themselves.’
By 1909, the hatpin was considered an international threat, with the police chiefs in Hamburg and Paris considering measures to regulate their length.
In March 1910, Chicago’s city council ran with that idea, debating an ordinance that would ban hatpins longer than nine inches; any woman caught in violation would be arrested and fined $50. The proceedings were packed with curious spectators, men and women, and acrimonious from the start. “If women care to wear carrots and roosters on their heads, that is a matter for their own concern, but when it comes to wearing swords they must be stopped,” a supporter said. Cries of “Bravo!” from the men; hisses from the women. Nan Davis, there to represent several women’s clubs, asked for permission to address the committee. “If the men of Chicago want to take the hatpins away from us, let them make the streets safe,” she said. “No man has a right to tell me how I shall dress and what I shall wear.”
Despite Davis’ impassioned speech, the ordinance passed by a vote of 68 to 2. Similar laws subsequently passed in several other cities, including Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and New Orleans. Ten thousand miles away, in Sydney, Australia, sixty women went to jail rather than pay fines for wearing “murderous weapons” in their hats. Even conservative London ladies steadfastly refused to buy hatpin point protectors.
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I know this blog will be controversial however I do believe sometimes to get a message across is by showing how absurd things are. The fact is Adolf Hitler liked to dress up, I am not saying he was a drag queen but I think he may have had tendencies towards it,and behind closed doors you just don’t know what happened.
He actually spent a lot of money on clothes, the picture above is a bill of one of his tailors.
In this rare picture below, at first glance, Hitler looks like a bad pantomime dame, but is actually sporting a Japanese kimono.
The Fuhrer is seen donning the swastika-emblazoned traditional dress in the 1930s, despite not being known for his love of different cultures.
Bizarrely, before the start of WWII, from when he was sworn in as chancellor in 1933, it was quite common for Germans to buy novelty nick nacks bearing an image of the Fuhrer, such as this.
Its exact origin is not known, but it is speculated it was taken to commemorate the signing of the international pact between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan on November 25 1936.
Really how could the Germans take anyone serious dressed in these shorts.
The one thing that I often noticed in Hitler’s body language that it was very effeminate, this probably fueled the rumours he may have been gay.
Hitler banned publication of this image from an early Nazi propaganda book.
Hitler grinning inanely in another picture he tried to ban.
Hitler during imprisonment at Landsberg Prison. He was visited by fellow party members, 1924.
In 1923, Hugo Boss founded his own clothing company in Metzingen, a small town south of Stuttgart, where it is still based. In 1924 he started a factory along with two partners. The company produced shirts, jackets, work clothing, sportswear and raincoats. Due to the economic climate of Germany at the time, Boss was forced into bankruptcy.
Boss joined the Nazi Party in 1931, two years before Adolf Hitler came to power. By the third quarter of 1932, the all-black SS uniform (to replace the SA brown shirts) was designed by SS-Oberführer Prof. Karl Diebitsch and Walter Heck (graphic designer).
The Hugo Boss company produced these black uniforms along with the brown SA shirts and the black-and-brown uniforms of the Hitler Youth.
Some workers are acknowledged to have been French and Polish prisoners of war forced into labour. In 1999, US lawyers acting on behalf of Holocaust survivors started legal proceedings against the Hugo Boss company over the use of slave labour during the war. The misuse of 140 Polish and 40 French forced workers led to an apology by the company.
In 1945 Hugo Boss had a photograph in his apartment of him with Hitler, taken at Hitler’s Obersalzberg retreat.
The Hugo Boss company was one of 15,000 clothing companies that produced uniforms for Nazi Germany.
Because of his early Nazi Party membership, his financial support of the SS and the uniforms delivered to the Nazi Party, Boss was considered both an “activist” and a “supporter and beneficiary of National Socialism”. In a 1946 judgment he was stripped of his voting rights, his capacity to run a business, and fined “a very heavy penalty” of 100,000 DM ($70,553 U.S. dollars).However, Boss appealed, and he was eventually classified as a ‘follower’, a lesser category, which meant that he was not regarded as an active promoter of Nazism.
He died in 1948, but his business survived.
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I know there are a lot of people who will disagree me on this but I think the seventies music was great,with bands like Deep Purple,Led Zeppelin,the Eagles,the Who at the height of their success.Emerging artists like David Bowie and Gary Numan giving an artistic edge to the music scene.
However when it comes to fashion!That is a completely different ball game altogether. Especially men’s fashion Thank God I was too young at the time to wear men’s clothes
Below are a few examples of 70’s fashion. I’d suggest to put on sunglasses for this one.
Don’t say I haven’t warned you.If you are eating or drinking something please put it down now.
I can’t say the women were much better though.
Not sure what this is, Mexican western style or beach sports attire. They should not have been smoking the funny stuff before getting dressed.
Leaving you with Mungo Jerry his sideburns were a fashion statements on their own. As for the lyrics.
“If her daddy’s rich take her out for a meal
If her daddy’s poor just do what you feel”
I don’t think you’d get away with that nowadays.
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History of Sorts 
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