An observation that stuck recently with me from costume designer John Dunn , was that when he was researching the clothes for Boardwalk Empire he was surprised to see how much colour was in the wools and the silks worn during the Jazz Age after rummaging through wool bunch cards from the period because he was so used to seeing sepia monochromatic images from the 1920's. Those images can roughly tell us texture and pattern but not colour. The resulting wardrobe on the television show was a pivotal change, certainly in my mind, as to how I viewed the clothes of the period - they had always seemed so sombre but now they had an energetic vivacity when brought back to life in this relatively new production.
Recently on a weekend I was left home alone and so I indulged in a Netflix show "World War 2 In Colour". Whilst the colour improved my experience of the period it was still rather flat to a certain extent as there was only so much you could do to the footage. It still doesn't do the cloths and the colours of those cloths enough justice. For most of us that didn't experience the period first hand, we are still often left considering the period in monochromatic terms. To make my case, I post below a sample of what we might have seen had we had today's technology then.
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