More Shades of Grey - Re-using Old Shop Assistant Uniforms for Disciplinary Purposes

Harking back to my ‘Brighton  Shock’ posting of last week; I've been surfing the net trying to find a colour photo of the shopgirl uniform mentioned - i.e. an adapted vintage 1960s Marks & Spencer's staff uniform dress - as I imagine many of you will have been left in the dark despite my floundering attempts to paint a picture in words.  This was the best I could come up with.  I've had to play around with the colour balance a little as the original had a noticeable red cast to it, possibly due to the original photograph having been exposed to light and having faded over time.  In so doing I've relied on memory to try to get the dress colour right as the priority rather than worry about skin tone (possibly a mistake, I don't know).  The odd thing is that I recall from the period (although I was rather young) a thin light-blue plastic belt being worn with it – and indeed it was such a belt that was threaded through the belt loops of my shopgirl chum’s dress, not the broad dark belt as shown in the photograph.  It was all man-made fibres - a woven terylene and nylon blend, I believe - practical but not exactly comfortable.  In the summer the staff must have sweated buckets, especially with a girdle or corsellete beneath – but what wonderful discipline for a girl of today to undergo.  

The reason I am so fascinated is that many years ago (mid to late 1980s) my wife of the time and I had a girl in her late teens living with us in what developed into something of a genuine D/S lifestyle (I have written about this before - albeit rather sketchily - and it can be found in the blog archive using the search facility in the right-hand sidebar and a little imagination).  Anyway, to cut a long story short the deal was that she did the housework in return for room and board and a little pocket money (and I mean a little).  With Penny (the girl's name) acting as housekeeper and cleaner and day by day becoming noticeably more firmly under my wife's authority it just began to seem right that something be done to make clear her position within our household.  

For purely practical reasons a pinafore apron had been procured (from a very traditional small independent department store in the Holloway Road, North London) but never looked right over jeans and T-shirt nor even the old skirt Penny sometimes wore.  Then one day - perhaps a few months in to the relationship, I can't quite remember exactly - a friend of the wife's who happened to work for Marks & Spencer brought around an old shopfloor uniform dress (M & S were just updating their uniform to a new look at the time), a cream coloured polyester dress with a green and ochre lattice check pattern (I just looked it up that uniform changeover on the Marks & Spencer's archive web page and it would date the period to 1986).  

There was much whingeing and moaning from an outraged Penny but my wife's somewhat domineering personality won the day and despite the girl's complaining that besides anything else the dress just didn't fit - she was rather a plump young thing and it was true that the buttons could hardly constrain her bust and the fabric did stretch at the seams over her bottom and hips - coupled with pinafore apron worn over the top, it soon became her daily outfit.  I seem to remember the dress had long sleeves with fitted cuff s and it definitely buttoned up the front, even though the closest I can find from that period on the Marks & Spencer's archive website is short-sleeved and zip fronted - and to be honest I can’t explain the discrepancy.  It also came with a plastic belt threaded through belt loops - I later used  to use it across her bottom; but that's a different story! 

The problems with the ill fitting dress, incidentally - which I personally found quite charming - were later solved when a visit to a charity shop unearthed a genuine vintage Playtex girdle (which of course became an excuse for insisting on stockings, and it all went on from there).   

In hindsight I think I would have given anything to have seen Penny in one of those 1960s dresses (Although I did get to see her put in a nylon overall from that same period - furnished by the same charity shop as I recall!).