Model Tote Bags: Advice on How to Perform the Fashionable Self in Post-war Fashion Modelling Literature

In their examination of “Models as Brands,” Joanne Entwistle and Don Slater point to how fashion models “are complex objects whose meanings are actively constituted in multiple locations” (2012, 17-18). Employing “brand” as a conceptual framework, they argue that when considering the multiple locations in which the model appears, “distinctions between real/representation, material/immaterial break down and we can begin to think about models and their ‘influence’ in more complex and comprehensive ways” (18; see also Lury 2004 and Moor 2007).

In this article I turn to popular literature for an examination of one such location in which models and their influence are produced, consumed, and performed. Ifocus on forms of “advice literature” published in the mid- to late-post-war period, and in particular, three Anglo-American texts authored by model agents published at the turn of the late 1960s: Eileen Ford’s Book of Model Beauty (1968), Secrets of the Model’s World (1970), and Lucie Clayton’s The World of Modelling: and How to Get the London Model-girl Look (1968).