Wooden Soles and Tall Hats: Dress and Defiance in Occupied France

In the photographs, Paris under German occupation can look oddly elegant: women cycling past in high turbans, platform shoes clattering on the pavement. The images are real, and they are also a trap. A tall hat in 1942 could be a gesture of pride, a sensible use of scraps, or simply the product of a milliner with customers on every side. The historian’s job is to separate three things that the clothes of 1940 to 1944 tend to blur together: getting by, quiet defiance, and organized resistance. A fourth, collaboration, ran through the same workshops.

The standard study is Dominique Veillon’s La Mode sous l’Occupation, translated as Fashion under the Occupation.¹ This article draws on her published comments, on curators who have handled the surviving objects, and on the archival record where it bears on the people involved.

The ration card and the wardrobe

Clothing became a matter of paperwork. According to Catherine Join-Dieterle, an art historian and heritage curator, the occupying power claimed about three-quarters of French production, and the French bought clothes, like food, with ration coupons.² Veillon notes that the textile card existed from January 1941, and that in many families it was the mother who kept it.³ Join-Dieterle’s summary of what a woman could obtain is sobering: two dresses, one winter coat, a handful of blouses and underthings, six pairs of stockings, and a single pair of flat shoes that had to last four years.²

The rules reached into the cut of garments. In 1942, Join-Dieterle explains, men’s suits and overcoats lost their gussets, box pleats and half-belts, trousers were allowed one pocket and no cuffs, and double-breasted waistcoats were banned, all to save cloth.² The manufacture of leather handbags was prohibited from 1941.³ Some small things escaped: ribbons narrower than 20 centimeters could be bought without a ticket.³

Those with money had another route. Jane Aubaile, who kept diaries as a girl in Neuilly, on the edge of Paris, remembered black-market cloth sold under the counter in Montmartre at roughly double the prewar price, handed over wrapped in newspaper so that the buyer did not know the color until she got home.³ Veillon describes this trade as a “grey market” that kept families supplied in a city where the ration was not enough to live on.³ None of this was resistance. It was survival, and it favored those who could pay.

Wooden soles, painted legs and Système D

The French had a name for improvisation: Système D, from se débrouiller, to manage. The editors of the Modes pratiques interview list its familiar images, wide hats of newspaper, wooden-soled shoes, and legs dyed to imitate stockings with a line pencilled up the back, and then test them against memory and the archive.³

Wooden soles hold up best. With leather scarce, shoemakers turned to wood, and the 2009 exhibition on women’s accessories in occupied Paris, organized with the Galliera fashion museum, showed both the articulated sole, cut in hinged sections, and the solid platform.⁴ A 1941 advertisement for wooden soles from the shoemaker Heyraud promised a “Perfect mix of ingenuity and Parisian elegance.”³ Aubaile recalled that the shoes were heavy and noisy until cork was added, and that her older sister wore them because there was nothing else.³ A reviewer of the 2009 show reported that patents for new soles and shoe materials multiplied as never before.⁵

Painted legs were real too. Aubaile’s brother, an art student, drew the seam line on her sister’s calves.³ A reviewer of the 2009 exhibition described a commercial tinting cream sold for the purpose, and noted that real stockings fetched a fortune on the black market.⁵ Other substitutes were stranger: a period advertising film encouraged women to have their dogs clipped so the hair could be spun for coats, and cheap furs were made from cat skins.⁵

The newspaper hat needs more care. The Modes pratiques editors note that such hats were made only for a wealthy minority, while most women wore wraps, berets and fedoras.³ The most photographed wartime fashions were not the most typical ones.

Hats, ribbons and the politics of color

Hats are where the language of defiance is most often used. Join-Dieterle describes hats rising ever higher, worn “to keep heads held high,” and fabrics printed in blue, white and red.² The exhibition review mentions small bibis perched on the head early in the war as well as large turbans, along with a newsreel asking women not to wear bulky hats to the cinema.⁵

Was a tall hat resistance? It could express a feeling, and many women remembered it that way. But the tricolor was not a resistance monopoly. Join-Dieterle mentions tricolor prints bearing the slogan travail, famille, patrie, which was the motto of Pétain’s Vichy state.² The 2009 exhibition placed a resister’s double-bottomed bag beside a scarf decorated with the “Voyages du Maréchal” (Pétain’s official tours), and the organizers described accessories as tools of Vichy propaganda as well as of the women who hid leaflets in false-bottomed and double-walled bags.⁴⁵ The same objects served both camps. The bag with a secret compartment is evidence of resistance; the hat on the woman carrying it is not.

Veillon gives one case of patriotic color drawing a penalty from the Germans: she says the occupiers, troubled by Madame Grès’s patriotism, which included dresses in blue, white and red, closed her house in January 1944; it reopened in March.³

The zazous and the parody star

The zazous were young Parisians devoted to swing. The word appears in a 1938 song by Johnny Hess, “Je suis swing.”⁶ Young men wore long jackets, narrow trousers and heavy unpolished shoes; young women wore turtlenecks, short pleated skirts and striped stockings, and carried a folded umbrella in all weather.⁶ Join-Dieterle stresses the extravagant cut, at a moment when fabric was rationed, and the longer hair that answered the military crop.² Vichy’s moralists detested them, and in 1942 the collaborationist press ran a campaign it called the chasse au zazou, the zazou hunt.²⁶

Hostility from the regime does not make a style into a resistance movement, and jazz stayed on the air under German control, often with its American titles given French names.⁶ One action, though, crossed a line. The German ordinance making the yellow star compulsory for Jews in the occupied zone took effect on June 7, 1942.⁷ Serge Klarsfeld records that on June 7 and 8, as the star became compulsory, fifteen men and twenty women were arrested in Paris for wearing stars inscribed “Swing,” “Zazou,” “Victory,” “Goy” and other words. Twenty of those over eighteen were interned, the men at Drancy and the women at the camp of Les Tourelles, made to wear the label “Friends of the Jews,” and released after three months.⁷ The World ORT history of French jazz adds a silent protest in Saint-Germain in 1943 by a group wearing cardboard stars.⁶

These protests were real and costly, and they were aimed at a measure of persecution, not at fashion. They also need to be seen alongside the much larger fact recorded on the same page of Klarsfeld’s chronology: within days of the star ordinance, German officials were planning the deportation of some 40,000 Jews from France, in convoys to Auschwitz due to begin in July 1942.⁷ For the non-Jewish protesters, the parody star meant three months in a camp; for the Jews it marked, the star was a step toward deportation.

Couture under occupation: Lelong and the question of collaboration

High fashion faced a different threat. In 1939 Paris had seventy registered couture houses.⁸ With war and occupation, private clients scattered and international sales almost ceased.⁸ Join-Dieterle lists Vionnet and Schiaparelli among the houses that closed, says Chanel left for the south of France and closed hers too, and notes that young designers such as Balmain and Dior had been called up.² Germany wanted to make Berlin the capital of fashion at Paris’s expense.³ Lucien Lelong, president of the couturiers’ trade body, the Chambre Syndicale, argued against moving the industry; the V&A quotes his reply as “It is in Paris or it is nowhere.”⁸

Keeping couture in Paris preserved skilled jobs, and Join-Dieterle notes that after 1941 many came to see the survival of French craft as a form of resistance.² It also meant continuing to sell in an occupied city, where, as Veillon notes below, some houses actively courted German clients. Veillon’s verdict on Lelong is careful: he was tried for collaboration but, defended by his peers, was cleared of most of it “under the pretext that he was protecting employment under occupation.”³ She adds that the plan to move couture to Berlin was kept secret and became widely known only after the war.³

On individual houses she is blunter. Of Jacques Fath she says “The archives are unequivocal on that front,” calling him very pro-German, and she describes Maggy Rouff and Marcel Rochas as “even more zealous collaborators,” who showed collections privately to Germans; Rochas, she says, was ready to open a house in Berlin.³ These are a historian’s judgments from the archive, given in an interview, and they show how unevenly the label “resistance” can be stretched over the trade.

Chanel and what the files show

Gabrielle Chanel is the most argued-over case. She lived for a time at the Ritz with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a German diplomat suspected of intelligence work.⁹ A French intelligence note of November 1944, among the wartime secret-service archives that historians presented to the public in 2016, reports a Madrid source describing her as Dincklage’s mistress and agent in 1942-43.¹⁰ The archivist in charge told the Associated Press that the German service, the Abwehr, had registered her: “From the German point of view, they registered her, so it means she potentially could be a source of information, fulfill a mission, work for them.” He added that it was not known whether she was aware of it.¹⁰

Further details, an agent number (F-7124) and the code name “Westminster,” are reported by Snopes from a 2014 France 3 documentary, L’Ombre d’un doute; Snopes adds that none of this has been officially confirmed, so they stand as reported claims, not established fact.⁹ Snopes also reports, quoting her letter of May 5, 1941, Chanel’s attempt that year to use German “Aryanization” law to take control of Parfums Chanel from its Jewish majority owners, the Wertheimers, who had fled; it failed because the business had been transferred to a non-Jewish associate.⁹ Veillon notes that she was arrested at the Liberation and freed after a high-ranking Englishman intervened, and that her house reopened only in 1954.³ Whatever her exact role, none of it belongs in a story of fashion as resistance.

Survival, defiance, resistance: telling them apart

The clothes of occupied France make a convincing story of ingenuity, and that story is mostly true. Wooden soles, painted legs, reworked tartan skirts and knitted parcels for prisoners show people coping with scarcity.³ A reviewer of the 2009 exhibition noted the period saying it chose as its conclusion: “la correction est preuve d’un moral élevé et courageux,” roughly, a neat appearance is proof of high and courageous morale.⁵ Keeping up appearances could be a way of refusing to look defeated, but Vichy and the occupiers could applaud the same neatness.

What the record supports, then, is a scale. At one end is survival: the ration card, Système D, the black market. In the middle is defiance that rarely carried risk: a tall hat, a patriotic button, a swing record. Further along are acts that did carry risk, such as the parody stars that led to internment, or tricolor gowns that, Veillon says, led the Germans to close a couture house. Resistance in the full sense used clothing as equipment, the false-bottomed bag that carried leaflets.⁴ And running alongside all of it was collaboration, from couture houses that courted German clients to a designer who tried to profit from antisemitic law. The surviving shoes and hats are worth looking at closely precisely because they do not, on their own, say which of these their owners chose.

Footnotes

1. Veillon 2002, Fashion under the Occupation (catalog record). ↩

2. Étiève-Cartwright 2024, interview with Join-Dieterle, World History Encyclopedia. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

3. Bass-Krueger and Kurkdjian 2022, Modes pratiques, interview with Aubaile, Veillon and Behlen, text and captions. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷

4. FashionUnited, June 3, 2009 (exhibition text). ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Vaucelle, La Libre Belgique, August 26, 2009. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. World ORT, “The Double Life of French Jazz.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

7. Klarsfeld 1996, French Children of the Holocaust, pp. 31-33 (entries for May 29 to June 15, 1942). ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. V&A, “The Golden Age of Couture,” section “Post-war and the Théâtre de la Mode.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

9. Binkowski, Snopes, March 6, 2017. ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. Corbet, Associated Press, March 17, 2016. ↩ ↩²