Before we knew Kate or Naomi, before even Twiggy, or Jean “the Shrimp” Shrimpton, there was another British export who made waves as a supermodel of her era.
In 1951 Barbara Goalen’s face – according to a Herald Sun article published that same year – had become “as familiar to Britons as Winston Churchill’s”. But how many today could recall her impossibly waspish waist or her haughty eyebrows, in the same way they might recognise Twiggy by the spikes of her lashes alone?
Barbara was in vogue in every sense, appearing in almost every issue of British Vogue at her peak in the early 1950s. You might see her on the magazine’s cover, her arched brow squaring up to a pheasant feather bonnet; or she’d appear poised and immaculate in an advertisement inside for Horrockses pinstriped shirt dresses.
She was a commercially successful “money girl” before the modelling term was even invented, but also a couture icon. Her now-vintage editorials looked (and still look) sensational – certainly worthy of an Instagram fan account. Now she is being celebrated in a new book, Supermodels Discovered, alongside the best in history – from Veruschka to Cindy, to Gigi and Anok today.
Barbara’s own discovery story was quite something. Until 1946, it hadn’t crossed her mind that she might like to become a fashion plate. She was a housewife in Hampshire, married to commercial pilot Ian Goalen. The couple had met whilst she worked as a cartographist for the British Overseas Airways Corporation at Whitechurch during World War II, and they had two young children. When Ian was killed in a plane crash, leaving her a widow at 25, Mrs Goalen decided to look for a job.
“I didn’t have to work for money but I needed to for myself,” she later recalled. Her own childhood had been privileged – her father owned a rubber plantation in Malaysia, and she had been sent to boarding school at St Mary’s Calne. “I had to do something and friends suggested I tried modelling. I happened to be the right shape at the time. I was seven and a half stone and my measurements were: charlies 33, waist 18 – yes really – and hips 31.”
She began modelling at the end of 1946 – conveniently just as Christian Dior was conceiving his post-war New Look. Her first contract was in London, where she worked for six months as a house model for Giuseppe Mattli, then one of the city’s biggest designer names.
A Mattli picture published in the Daily Express got her noticed by another designer, Julian Rose, and that led to more work, including editorials in British Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
In the summer of 1948 she made her debut in Paris, posing for Clifford Coffin’s lookbooks at Christian Dior. Dior loved the way that his clothes fit on Barbara’s proportions, and she modelled many of his iconic creations – Horst P Horst photographed her in the magnificent cascading “Junon” gown (Natalie Portman memorably wore a recreation of the gown on the red carpet at Cannes in 2023), for Vogue in 1949. The magazine’s writers described one image of her wearing a back-buttoning Dior dress as akin to “a Ford” – ie, the look would be as universally popular as the iconic car, a testament to the dress design, yes, but also the selling power of the woman wearing it.
Barbara also worked for Cristóbal Balenciaga – the French couturiers embraced her, and allowed her a level of success achieved by no other British model before. The Brits abroad were known as “mannequins” before the name “model girl” was imported from America. You might, therefore, say that Barbara was the first “super-mannequin”.
She could sell the so-called “mink and diamonds look” in London and Paris, but ensured she remained symbolic for fans all over the UK. She took part in thoroughly British photoshoots (posing for John French on London’s Charing Cross Station, and on the roof of a Lancashire textiles factory for Elsbeth Juda). She earned £3,000 per year – ten times more than a typically “good” salary at the time.
Just three years into her career, Barbara realised the value in exclusivity and began to increase her fees and turn down offers that no longer appealed. She had cosmetic surgery on the tip of her nose, and returned only to accept the most prestigious of assignments.
During this time she took some of the most important photographs of her career with photographers John Deakin and Anthony Denney. She went on a rockstar-esque tour across America, Australia and New Zealand, representing the British fashion trade globally. “She mustn’t be too scarce though, or she’d be forgotten,” one newspaper commentator wrote at the time. “Nor must she be seen too often, or there’ll be demand for someone new.” Surely a problem that has confronted so many would-be supermodels since?
As Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne, Barbara was named one of the Sunday Times Magazine’s people of the year – the “new Elizabethans” of 1952. She was entirely in demand, but chose to bow out on a high. Aged 33, and just seven years into her glittering career, she retired. She had remarried to the Lloyd’s underwriter Nigel Campbell, moved into a Belgravia townhouse, and went on to have two more children.
“I wanted to give up at the top,” she would later say. “I didn’t want to slide down the slippery slope.” Her modelling photographs, perhaps tellingly, were stuffed into a box in the basement. Her nonchalance about moving on (“I’ve no regrets, I don’t miss it,” she said years later) feels appropriately lofty – even cool. Perhaps another indicator that she possessed the ultimate supermodel attitude?
Caroline Leaper is the author of Supermodels Discovered, out now
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