You know that yearning you've had for Victorian workhouse fashion?

[squoosh]

Well yearn no more as someone has created workhouse inspired clothes for you!

www.workhouse-england.co.uk/index.html

Look at this gorgeous 'Workhouse Garment'. Doesn't it jauntily evoke despair and grinding poverty? A snip at £220.

I mean it's great it's all handmade in the made in the UK n'all but surely this must be where hipster fashion jumps the shark. Or jumps the pauper.

I think we're broadly saying the same thing anyway .
Sweatshops = bad.
Quality goods created by adequately paid people = good.
Pretentious marketing = wanky.

Sorry, that was to Floisme, but thanks Reuset .

Website is awful and the pictures aren't great but the clothes are lovely!

I love hipsters. They buy decent shit and put all their money back into the economy.

And they all work in design or new tech.

And I know one called Clarence.

Seriously.

Was he actually named Clarence at birth?! Nominative determinism .

I don't know

I don't think I could ask either

I'm appalled by the concept and the romanticisation of workhouses. My grandfather and his siblings were sent to a workhouse after their family imploded - and a workhouse with a terrible reputation even by late Victorian standards. The suffering imposed on the inmates, including small children (and my granddad at 10 was the oldest of four sibs) was entirely intentional. That's stripping back the true meaning of the workhouse, not this crap.

Work houses grew out of (charitably funded) poor relief for people who had nothing and nowhere else to go, at a time when most people lived on a knife edge (at a level comparable to Sudan or southern Somalia). No, it wasn't a nice, dignified existence; it provided gruel and a roof over your head (and probably exploitation and possibly rape if you were female) but the alternative was probable starvation.

Viewing history from the comforts of today, when only a tiny % of people live so precariously thanks to the welfare state and when so much is donated so spontaneously and quickly when catastrophes like Grenfell occur, is to see injustice where only relief was intended.

I think they have probably restored a Victorian edifice and repurposed it, and given the quality of Victorian buildings, it is likely to be both handsome and practical. I'm inclined to give the company the benefit of the doubt and attribute the company name to lack of tact.

Maybe I'm over-thinking this, but I'm going to go with it anyway.

This morning I'm finishing off making a dungaree dress for a friend while wearing a pair of jeans and a Breton shirt. All these originated as workwear for people doing dangerous, dirty, back-breaking labour of the kind that my forbears clawed their way up through the early twentieth century class system to escape. When I wear workwear, am I guilty of forgetting what these clothes were originally worn for?

If I add a khaki utility jacket, or camo-print scarf, shouldn't I remember that these things were originally worn by soldiers in the heat and danger and privation of the desert war? If I change my khaki jacket for a safari jacket, perhaps I should remember that I'm wearing the uniform of the colonial civil servants sent out to subdue the natives and rule the empire. Or possibly I could swap it for an African-inspired print dress, or a tunic over trousers, before I stop to consider the role that cheap fabrics played in the empire and particularly in the slave trade.

The clothes we wear have histories and sometimes -often - these are not very savoury. Calling your business 'workhouse' might not be in the best of taste, but it's not uniquely so. Perhaps sometimes it's better to bring difficult histories to mind rather than to forget them?

Historic clothing, divorced from history loses its resonance. But it remains very wearable, because of its practicality. It's not the same as wearing a cold shoulder top in the English summer because it's fashionable. IMVHO.

I'm with Floisme and Niminy I'm just not offended by it and can't understand why people are perpetually offended by everything.

I wish they had had some decent lighting so we could actually see the clothes

Totally off the point, but is that the bloke from the Torn vid?