Overview
Australia federated in 1901 and went on dressing British. Edwardian fashion arrived by ship and by pattern book, and city dress was indistinguishable from London’s — with one exception, worn by soldiers, that would end up meaning Australia more than anything else in the wardrobe.
Key garments and style
Men wore the sober three-piece suit and stiff collar of the period; women wore the S-bend corseted silhouette, high-necked blouses and very large hats. Department stores in Sydney and Melbourne carried imported goods and local copies, and mail order took the same fashions into the country.
The slouch hat is the exception. A broad-brimmed felt hat with the left side turned up, worn in colonial forces from the 1880s and standardised across the new Commonwealth forces, it was practical for sun and for shouldering a rifle, and it became the emblem of the Australian soldier within a generation.
Rural dress continued as it had, and the rabbit-felt hat trade that supplied both the bush and the army was a real Australian manufacture in a market otherwise dominated by imports.
Wool remained the national industry, though the country still largely exported fleece and imported cloth.
Transition
The First World War fixed the slouch hat in national memory, and wartime uniform and austerity shaped the decades that followed.