Past Events

Glamour, Excess and Commodification: The Female Body in 1950s Britain

Research Seminar – Lynda Nead

  • 26 May 2021
  • 6:00 – 7:30 pm
  • This series of Research Seminars will be delivered by our Senior Fellows who were awarded in 2019 to talk on the research they have conducted as part of their fellowship.

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 paper will explore the many meanings of the female body in 1950s Britain.

About the speaker

  • Headshot of Lynda Nead with window in background.

    Lynda Nead is Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on a range of art historical subjects and particularly on the history of British visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent book is The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press). She has a number of advisory roles in national art museums and galleries and is a Trustee of the Holburne Museum and of Campaign for the Arts. She is currently writing a book called British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain.