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sewing and knitting. The eighth chapter, which explores women’s physical fitness, seems to sit a little uneasily apart from the concerns with clothing that are the central focus of the book. Either the discussions on beauty needed to be more developed or perhaps the book more clearly organized into separate sections on beauty and fashion. Chapter 9 is a fascinating exploration of the British reaction to Parisian couture after the liberation of France. Before the liberation, Picture Post had run articles indicating that Parisian fashion remained luxurious and opulent but had become the preserve of Nazi women and French collaborators, rather than French women generally. After the liberation, the magazine’s tone shifted: it now claimed that French designers had served the French people by keeping French men and women in the needle trades employed during the difficult German occupation. A final short conclusion reiterates Howell’s claims for the usefulness of Picture Post as an archive of popular taste. Howell’s descriptions of the various articles on clothing and beauty that Picture Post ran between 1938 and 1945 show the potential of the magazine to serve as an important archive for historians of dress and fashion. The book has some issues, however. As already indicated, several of the chapters would have benefited from being more clearly integrated into the study. As well, a content analysis would have strengthened Howell’s claim that this was an activist magazine, since the percentage of the magazine’s content devoted to such subjects would be clear. Finally, and most crucially, the book would have benefited from being situated more firmly within a critical context. Howell tends to accept at face value the claims of the magazine’s editors, writers, and photographers that they were determined to be truthful and to bring injustices to light. Such claims need to be interrogated much more critically than Howell has done in order to prove that the magazine is indeed as reliable an archive as she argues. Howell has done historians a service by sharing the riches of Picture Post, but further work needs to be done in order to appreciate this source’s strengths and weaknesses.