The End of Mourning
The elaborate rituals of public mourning were in decline by 1917, mainly because WWI had given people way too many reasons to mourn and because it was impractical for women, who were just beginning to enter the workforce. Also, and I can’t find anything to support this directly, but I imagine that people during WWI saw buying clothing you rarely wore as wasteful, especially since good citizens were supposed to be conserving fabric. Fabric was crucial to the war effort, and the resulting restrictions put on clothiers was the main reason why the excessive luxury of Edwardian fashions abruptly gave way to simpler, more modern frocks.
Before WWI, wealthy women were expected to buy a new wardrobe adhering to strict rules for full mourning, which usually lasted a year for a husband. Afterwards, this clothing just sat around taking up space until there was another death in the family. Women who could not afford to do this dyed their regular clothing black. This tradition goes back thousands of years in the West but it was made into something fashionable, not simply a means of showing grief, when Queen Victoria went into lifelong mourning after her husband, Prince Albert, died in 1861. Since the royal family set the standards for every social convention, women attempted to copy the Queen even though most of them did not have endless money and servants at their disposal. Even working class women did this, and you can imagine how impractical it was for a factory worker who could barely afford the two outfits she owned to dye them a color unwearable a year later.
Read my article about Victorian mourning rituals to learn more.
Read my article about Victorian mourning rituals to learn more.