Does anybody know if the clothes worn by Hyacinth and company are authentic? Did British women really wear dresses and pumps to clean the church in 1990? Hyacinth wore a dress,jacket and gloves to the Beach and Elizabeth had on a dress as usual. The Vicar's wife's dresses looked like they were left over from the Grapes of Wrath and she was a young woman. Also, I've noticed on several British shows they had half refrigerators. Is that common in Britain? Just curious.
shareI am guessing the clothes are somewhat reflective of the social setting the characters are in. Onslow wears jeans among other things so it is not like they have a denim phobia. Rose wears things typical for a 20 year old girl out to nab men at the time so again no censorship or restriction. People can be comfortable in a great number of different of clothing options when things such as peer pressure and marketing blitzes are absent. What we consider awful or acceptable here in the US is often a function of social conditioning.
shareI agree that those old-fashioned clothes reflect that these people belong to a "better" social class. Daisy and Rose mostly wear a more casual style of clothes. And except for the vicar's wife, who seems to be a bit younger, most of these people are at least in their 50s. So I guess that if we ever got to see Sheridan or Gail (Elizabeth's daughter), they would be wearing more casual clothes too.
Intelligence and purity.
In keeping with her character, Hyacinth overdresses for everything. She is the sort of person who would volunteer to do something for the local church but dress up in her best outfit, hat, gloves etc. to impress people - and then when she got there (to her horror) find out that they were cleaning the floor or manning a soup kitchen. That's part of the comedy.
The vicar's wife dresses in a dowdy, fusty sort of fashion precisely because she is a vicar's wife. Vicar's are usually portrayed in British popular culture as either stuffy, socially awkward, untrendy people OR as the vicar who is trying too hard to be hip and 'down with the kids'.
As someone else has already said, most of the cast are middle-aged and so would dress in a slightly old-fashioned way. You could not imagine Hyacinth wearing denims could you?
Onslow is a slob and his clothes reflect that. Rose dresses to attract men and so dresses accordingly.
"Half-Refrigerators" or fridge-freezers as we call them in Britain are incredibly common in the UK and I would guess much of Europe. The top half is a refrigerator the bottom half a freezer. If British households do have a separate chest freezer in addition to a fridge-freezer then there usually isn't room for it in the kitchen so it is often housed in an adjoining room. Sometimes, if the house has one, a utility room or more often in the garage.
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Sparks Moran: "It was dusk. I could tell 'cause the sun had gone down"
I think the vicar's wife was presented as a foil for Rose, so the costume designer had her come off as less "desirable" than Rose, in both dress and manner. It heightened the awkwardness of the compromising situations she found her husband in with Rose. Also--pretending the KUA-verse is real--the vicar's wife may have thought she should dress more conservatively being married to a clergyman and having to keep up appearances to the congregation.
shareThe clothes are a slightly more old fashioned, formal version of clothes that people in a similar social setting would have worn about 25 years ago. Look through any of those clothing ads for women in the Sunday papers even today and the styles are pretty similar.
I think people in sitcoms tend to look a bit more dressed up because their clothes are usually brand new and picked out of a catalogue by a clothing designer to give a particular 'look' to a character. So the styles are sometimes a bit exaggerated in order to emphasise certain aspects of the character. As somebody mentioned, the vicar's wife probably wouldn't dress in quite such a frumpy style in real life, but she does in the series to show that she is a slightly frumpy woman and to contrast with Rose's glamorous look.
'Monsters? We're British!'