1960s Model Girl: Narrative Identities in Fashion, Time and History

(Hardback)

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Description

1960s Model Girl explores the wealth of life-writing surrounding the independent, successful, wage-earning and glamourous Model Girls in the British fashion industry in the post-war period, ranging from autobiography and memoir to advice literature and educative text. Providing an introduction to theories of life-writing, auto/biography and narrative, 1960s Model Girl demonstrates how these can be applied to the study of fashion. It also shows us how fashion studies can open up new ways of understanding identity and emergent British femininities. McDowell draws on a wealth of archival research and the writing of professional women in the field including Jean Shrimpton, Mary Quant, and Janey Ironside and explores these narratives through the lens of the popular culture and mass media of the late 1950s and 1960s. Focusing on the cultural idea of the Model Girl, McDowell offers a multi-disciplinary insight into the relationship between name, face, labour, production and consumption one which sheds light on our own mass-media present, as well as illuminating the cultural past.

Author Bio

Felice McDowell is Course Leader of the MA Fashion Cultures and Histories programme at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK. She is co-editor (with Leah Armstrong) of Fashioning Professionals (Bloomsbury, 2018).