A photograph of High Street shops in Kirkcaldy, Fife, 1959.
This photograph captures the fashions and car designs of the late 1950s and highlights just how much these things have changed in the last forty-five years. World War II (1939 - 1945) had only ended fourteen years previously and rationing continued on some items well into the 1950s. The economy took a number of years to recover form the war and luxury items were very rare.
This may explain why the people in the photogarph are rather conservatively dressed. There seems to be less individualism displayed fashion-wise than, perhaps, would be today. This is one of a series of photographs of shop fronts taken by the Dundee firm of Inglis Shepherd, Joiners and Shopfitters, to record shops they had worked on. The collection is now in the Scottish Life Archive of the National Museums of Scotland.
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