ABSTRACT
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, British national identity was in flux as the nation saw itself on the cusp of three separate possible destinies – as part of a European Common Market (associated with a utopic and progressive internationalism); allied with America but essentially independent (a vision that combined nostalgia for a recent past marked by international dominance in the sphere of popular culture and a desire to recapture a greater lost heritage spanning back centuries); and as a neo-colonial power through its Commonwealth (a conservative vision of an already lost empire). Within popular culture, the former two identities vied for prominence, both creating their own essentially gendered visions of nation. While the international articulation of the proto-European Britain became increasingly linked to the new, active yet glamorously feminine (epitomised in Swinging London heroines and their fashions), the latter image of a revived yet independent Britain was more forcefully expressed in masculine terms.
