A new book argues that glamour extends far beyond notions of luxury and high fashion
By G.T. | MELBOURNE
LOOK for images of “glamour” on Google and you’ll be bombarded with fashion photography, old Hollywood pin-ups and a vast number of heavily staged female celebrity portraits. According to the search engine, glamour seems to be a particularly labour-intensive form of beauty. Yet, as Virginia Postrel, a sociologist and columnist, argues in her recently published book, glamour should be seen as extending far beyond notions of luxury and high fashion.
According to “The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Presentation”, glamour is not merely an aesthetic signal or a by-product of consumer envy, but “a form of communication that elicits a distinctive emotional response”. Ms Postrel argues that this response fuels ambitions and desires, with good and bad consequences in real life.
Some of the examples she gives of glamour are counterintuitive. The International House of Pancakes, a mass-market restaurant chain, may seem like the antithesis of glamour, but it gave middle Americans a passport to European sophistication in the early 1960s by offering blintzes and crêpes alongside more traditional fare.
Ms Postrel also finds glamour in wind turbines, which “aren’t just about generating electricity … [but] symbols of an ideal world—longing disguised as problem solving”. For the environmentally conscious, she says, turbines foster a technological hope for a world “not as it is but how we would like it to be”. Further arguments highlighting the glamour of Star Trek, high-speed rail, nuns, suicide bombing and the military are intriguing, even if Ms Postrel overstates the mystery and emotional longing that surround them.
When the dreamy, Instagram-filtered portrait of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the bombers of last year's Boston marathon, graced the cover of Rolling Stone, many critics accused the magazine of glamorising terrorism by turning the teenager into a rock star. Thomas Menino, the mayor of Boston, said it sent a "terrible message that destruction gains fame for killers and their causes". But for Ms Postrel, terrorism has always been glamorous; fame has little to do with it. The appeal lies in the supposed manliness of war, the romance of fighting for a Utopian cause, the allure of the jihadi afterlife.
Salman Rushdie once told Der Spiegelthat many terrorist acts were “influenced by the misdirected image of a kind of magic”. This is an idea that goes back to the very roots of “glamour”, a word derived from “gramarye”, a Scottish term for the casting of magic spells. The etymology suggests that glamour takes its seductive force from the promises it makes of transformation. It invites onlookers to imagine new ways of reinvention. Many are the readers ofVogue who have no intention of shelling out $2,000 on a pair of Azzedine Alaia ankle boots. But the clothes are a secondary consideration: escaping to another world provides its own enchantment.
Ms Postrel argues that glamour is most potent when it allows the imagination to trump rationality. Those of us living unglamorous lives should have little trouble recalling the agony and the ecstasy of being driven to abstraction.
