Glamour, excess and commodification: The female body in 1950s Britain Lynda Nead, Birkbeck, University of London

Event details

History of Art Research Seminar Series

This presentation considers the distinctive blonde bombshell body of the 1950s; curvaceous and opulent, almost baroque. This body seems the perfect corporeal expression of the emerging affluence and last-ditch military and imperial defiance of Britain in this period. It is the visual culmination of the migration of a U.S., Hollywood-style glamour to Britain. Glamour and sexualised femininity were part of a larger passage of commodities across the Atlantic in this period, but in the process something important happens: Blonde becomes British; Marilyn Monroe becomes Diana Dors, the pin-up girl of the Suez Crisis.

The vulgar excess of the 1950s bombshell body troubled and interfered with a deep-seated myth of British restraint and subtlety. It was, quite simply, too much, beyond containment, and in the end, it came down to a question of scale, or, more accurately, a loss of scale. The expansive female bodies of the 1950s demanded something more than existing flatscreen cinema technologies and these years saw an explosion of cinema-specific technological innovations such as CinemaScope, Cinerama, 3-D, stereoscopic sound and Technicolor.

Drawing on a range of visual culture including photography, film, cartoons and fine art, the seminar will explore the many meanings of the female body in 1950s Britain.