In this age of austerity I sometimes think governments expect us to do our bit by shopping the country out of recession.

The retail sector has colluded in this, of course, and so has the world of fashion. Back in 2008 the message could have been: "Sit tight, save your pennies, stay out of H&M and we'll come up smiling in [insert appropriate year/decade/century]".

Instead, they basically said this: "Shop as much as you ever did but make your consumption a little less conspicuous by swapping quantity for quality and buying just a few 'classic pieces'."

Fair enough? Not really. The trouble with quality, you see, is that it's expensive. So by the time you've pared back your shopping list to just the "classic essentials" - a pair of £250 brogues, a £300 raincoat and cashmere polo necks in Elephant's Breath Grey, Troon Marina Rust and SPFL Referee Black - it's cost you more than if you had visited H&M every lunchtime for a year. So essentially we've been conned into spending twice as much on clothes in the bad times as we would have in the good. Yet again, it us whose pockets are being hit - and it's little consolation that those pockets are attached to a pair of expensively-tailored tweed trousers.

But during and after the Second World War, things looked very different. Back then, government had the wacky idea of actually stopping people buying clothes by rationing what was available. They even issued coupons.

This previous era of austerity chic is the subject of Fashion On The Ration, an exhibition opening next month at the Imperial War Museum in London. In an accompanying book, author Julie Summers mines diaries, letters and photographic archives to tell the story of how Britain's men and women adapted, improved, cannibalised and customised what was available to them.

Looking ahead to the AW43 season, for instance, Vogue gave its female readers just this simple advice: "All that is asked of you is that you shall look as charming as possible". And if that meant sewing some lace onto a pair of underpants to turn them into knickers, so be it. Summers quotes one wife who did just that when her husband was due home on leave. Mind you, he didn't even notice. Some things never change, eh?

Sure there was privation - trouser turn-ups were banned and there were questions in parliament about the length of men's socks - but in the teeth of real austerity people put their imaginations and their abilities to work to create new wardrobes out of scant materials. It's exactly the sort of visionary get-up-and-go for which our fashion industry is still venerated today - that same industry which tries to sell us pricey "utility wear" which makes a mockery of the thinking behind the real thing. I'm not arguing for a return to coupons and rationing, but perhaps we should buy less and invent more. Would the results look so bad?

Fashion On The Ration: Style In The Second World War is published on March 5 (Profile Books, £16.99)