This week, Lucy and Ben explore the life and times of Dress: Fancy’s patron saint, Cecil Beaton. The social upheavals in Europe between the First and Second World Wars created an unsettling mix of expectation and fear. Weary and wealthy, a privileged group of twenty-somethings attempted to turn doubt and despair into delight and delirium. Their antics and fancy dress shenanigans became legendary, but, Beaton apart, their hopes for escape remained tragically unfulfilled.

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• A Life A Life in Fashion: The Wardrobe of Cecil Beaton
• Cecil Beaton: Bright Young Things at the National Portrait Gallery 
• Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things, by Robin Muir
• DJ Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918-1940 (Vintage, 2008)
• Patricia Mears & Bruce G, Boyer, Elegance in the Age of Crisis: Fashions of the 1930s (Yale University Press, 2014)