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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.
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Notes on contributors
Connie Karol Burks
Connie Karol Burks is a curator of Textiles and Fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Previoulsy, she worked as Research Assistant on the 2018 exhibition Fashioned from Nature and was Assistant Curator of the 2019 exhibition Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams. Before working in museums, Connie co-founded the London Cloth Company, a small-scale cloth mill weaving on rescued and restored machinery. [email protected]