Model Woman: The Creation, Dissemination and Cultural Significance of Barbara Goalen’s Model Persona in Postwar Britain

Abstract

During her relatively brief but prolific career, spanning 1947–1954, Barbara Goalen became one of the most successful and widely-recognized fashion models in postwar Britain. Using extant material in her personal archive now housed in the Archive of Art and Design along with other image and text-based sources, this article traces the creation of Goalen’s public persona from anonymous face to renowned personality. Formed predominantly through images and text in mass media, it explores how this constructed ‘model persona’ powerfully denoted a particular aspect of the cultural zeitgeist in Britain at the time. Drawing on theories of photography, semiotics and celebrity the article discusses how Goalen represented and embodied a prescribed ‘ideal’ of society both physically, with her ‘look’, and culturally, with her persona, reflecting the dominant esthetic and cultural standards perpetuated by the fashion industry, and wider society, at the time. Following the growing body of work examining the significance of models in fashion history, this article uses Goalen as an example to demonstrate the important and active contributions that models make toward creating images and disseminating fashion culture, as well as representing a visual legacy of a moment in fashion.