Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright © 1954 The Norman Rockwell Family Entities
Before we can understand how glamour works, we have to further define what it does. If, like humor, glamour elicits an identifiable emotional response, what are those emotions? If glamour is a form of nonverbal rhetoric, of what does it persuade us?
One influential theory, advanced by the Marxist critic John Berger in his 1972 BBC series and book Ways of Seeing, is that glamour elicits social envy in order to sell commercial goods. Berger defines glamour as “the state of being envied.” He argues that advertising images generate glamour by “showing us people who have apparently been transformed” by whatever is being advertised “and are, as a result, enviable.” Glamour is, in this view, a byproduct of capitalism’s vicious game, in which only a few winners enjoy privileged status. The many losers are jealous and, thus, susceptible to glamour. “Glamour,” Berger declares, “cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.”1
Although Berger’s description does capture glamour’s transformational promise, his desiccated view misses many of its most potent appeals. He is blinded by envy, conflating it with desire. Envy is, of course, one form of desire—the wish to have what someone else has—and the social status Berger emphasizes in his analysis is indeed one desirable good. But it is hardly the only one. Most important, the resentment and hostility essential to true envy are missing from most forms of glamour. Glamour may be an illusion, but it is rarely a mean or vicious one, nor do audiences commonly dream of being resented for achieving a glamorous state. Glamour is not about separating winners from losers. Rather, the glamorous object—whether person, place, or thing—is a kind of alter ego. As Jay Z raps, “When you see me, see you!”2 Someone or something glamorous represents “that dream-self we all long to be,” a magic mirror in which we see ourselves transformed.3 We aspire to be like, or be with, those we find glamorous, not to rob them of the attributes we admire.
Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright © 1954 The Norman Rockwell Family Entities
Take Angelina Jolie, the subject of one of the most psychologically telling, because personally revealing, contemporary descriptions of movie-star glamour: a 2009 Harper’s Bazaar essay, “The Power of Angelina,” by the feminist writer Naomi Wolf. The article is not a conventional celebrity profile—Jolie and Wolf did not meet—but, rather, a discussion of the “life narrative” Jolie has “crafted.” Though framed explicitly as a story about artifice, it is pervaded by Wolf’s yearning to believe. Over the course of the essay, Jolie’s life functions as proof that the longings that inform Wolf’s own oeuvre are attainable: to be effortlessly thin and beautiful (The Beauty Myth), to participate in high-level public debates (Fire with Fire), to indulge sexual desire without condemnation or consequence (Promiscuities), and to become a mother without hassle or pain (Misconceptions). “The magic of Jolie’s self-presentation?” writes Wolf. “She makes the claim, with her life and actions, that, indeed, you can get away with it. All of it.”
This is not social envy. It is more akin to a schoolgirl crush. In one passage, Wolf projects her longings as the divorced mother of two onto Jolie’s own brief period as a single mother, in the process reworking a classic glamorous icon:
Then there is the plane. Women are so used to being dependent on others (certainly on men) for where they go, metaphorically, and how they get there. Flying a private plane is the classic metaphor for choosing your own direction; usually, that is a guy thing to do, yet there was Jolie, with her aviator glasses on, taking flying lessons so she could blow the mind of her four-year-old son. That is the ultimate in single-mom chic.
Airplanes and aviators are touchstones of modern glamour, and here Wolf alters their meaning. She transforms the plane from a universal symbol of freedom, mastery, and escape into a child-centered accessory demonstrating “single-mom chic.” In the process, she domesticates Jolie’s considerable appeal as a motorcycle-riding action star—a “man’s woman”—and also implicitly replaces the married-and-childless Amelia Earhart with a more personally satisfying aviatrix archetype.
Contrary to Berger’s definition, however, Wolf does not begrudge Jolie her glamorous life, nor does she covet Jolie’s social status. Rather, she admires the actress and longs to share the world she represents and, indeed, to bring other women along. “Jolie’s image is not just a mirror of one woman,” she concludes, “but also a looking glass for female fantasy life writ large.”4 That one fan can project so many different yearnings onto the actress, without exhausting her possible meanings, demonstrates why Jolie is such an icon. Glamour is most powerful when its object encompasses multiple desires.
In an early analysis of Hollywood glamour, the 1939 book America at the Movies, the researcher Margaret Farrand Thorp defined movie glamour as “sex appeal . . . plus luxury, plus elegance, plus romance,” suggesting that this elusive quality emerged from the mixture of all these elements.5 Like a complex perfume, glamour is enriched by layered notes, each with a different emotional resonance. Yet even astute analysts often try to reduce glamour to a narrow appeal. “ ‘Elegance’ seems dubious and ‘romance’ a euphemism,” writes the fashion historian Valerie Steele, responding to Thorp. Conflating glamour and its ironic impersonator “glam,” Steele declares that glamour is “never discreet or ladylike.”6 In this view, glamour has nothing to do with elegance. It is all about sex and luxury—the more conspicuous, the better. But equating glamour with flashy sexuality and over-the-top bling is as limiting as equating it with envy.
After all, Grace Kelly, who has been called “the most frequently referenced glamour icon in the history of fashion,” was polished and elegant, her sex appeal both unmistakable and discreet.7 Jackie Kennedy, another icon, wore suits like armor, designed to hide her body. “PROTECT ME,” she wrote to the designer Oleg Cassini.8 Greta Garbo’s sex appeal emerged from mystery and worldly nonchalance, not flash. Any reasonable definition of glamour must include these icons, as well as such masculine touchstones as James Bond, Steve McQueen, and Cary Grant.
As subjects and sources of desire, luxury and sex appeal can be potent elements in creating glamour. But not every form of luxury or sex appeal is glamorous. Mystery is required, and the most glamorous objects often contain a tantalizing element of denial, as the film critic Manohla Dargis recognizes when she lauds contemporary Chinese films, “cinemas of longing,” for creating “an extraordinary glamour born from the tension between release and repression.”9 Glamour leaves us wanting more.
Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu Wai in In the Mood for Love (2000), one of the Chinese films the critic Manohla Dargis describes as “cinemas of longing.”
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More important, sex and luxury are not the only possible desires, or even the only common ones. Contrary to Steele’s suggestion, Thorp did not use the word romance as a euphemism for sex—she already had sex appeal—but as a reference to something equally alluring to the predominantly female audiences she analyzed: the idealization of romantic love. The movies let viewers imagine being lavished with attention and devotion, minus the humdrum negotiations and daily routines of real relationships.
“What the typical adult American female chiefly asks of the movies is the opportunity to escape by reverie from an existence which she finds insufficiently interesting,” Thorp wrote. These moviegoers wanted something more precious than luxury, she said: “to be appreciated, not just by implication but right out loud.”
Their ideal is still the ideal husband of the Victorian era who told his wife at breakfast every morning how much she meant to him, but that husband is not a type which the postwar [World War I] American man has any interest in emulating. He prefers to conceal his deeper emotions at breakfast, and during the rest of the day as well. His wife, consequently, has to spend her afternoons at the movies.
In the movies a wife finds it quite worth while to get into a new evening frock for a tête-à-tête dinner at home because her husband is sure, by dessert time at least, to take her hand across the intimately small and inconvenient table and say, “Darling, you get lovelier every day.”10
In today’s more demonstrative age, we still recognize the allure of luxury and leisure in old movies but overlook the glamour of their portraits of married love, whether expressed in intimate endearments or rapid-fire affectionate banter.
Note, too, that these are portraits—still images of life transformed—not narratives. As we’ll explore in chapter four, Hollywood glamour emanates not from the details of any given plot but from the evocative images and ideas that carry over from movie to movie, lingering in memory to stir the viewer’s own fantasies even when story lines are forgotten.
So here is one answer to the question of what glamour does. It offers a lucid glimpse of desire fulfilled—if only life could be like that, if only we could be there, if only we could be like them. For all its associations with material goods, the fundamental and insatiable desires glamour taps are emotional.
U.S. Marine Corps
Critics like Berger often assume that glamour creates those desires. They imagine that if glamour disappeared, so would dissatisfaction—that, for example, women would not long to be young and beautiful if there were no cosmetic ads or movie stars.11 But glamour only works when it can tap preexisting discontent, giving otherwise inchoate longings an object of focus. Analyzing British moviegoers’ recollections of 1930s movies, the film scholar Annette Kuhn captures the phenomenon well when she argues that “there is an armature of desire, or wanting, onto which cinema hangs itself, so that the armature is clad with cinematic content.” The desire precedes the glamour, but the glamour gives it a specific form. In the case of 1930s films, “the abstract notion of better things, or a better life,” Kuhn continues, quoting her interviews, “is given content in the shape of the ‘way of living,’ the ‘lovely’ singing and dancing, and the ‘easy life’ enjoyed by people in films. At last, though, the underlying wish—both more and less than a desire for lovely things and an easy life—is baldly stated: ‘perhaps one day life will be like that.’ ”12
By turning diffuse yearnings into specific but selective images, glamour concentrates what the Japanese call akogare: “unfulfilled longings,” aspiration, and idealization, with a suggestion of the distant, foreign, or unattainable.13 It gives form to what the advertising pioneer Lois Ardery, writing in 1924, described as “inarticulate longings.”
We all know the woman who went to buy a practical blue gingham dress and came home with an impractical pink silk negligée. We all are that woman now and then. . . . Our known want and recognized need is for a blue gingham dress. But the sight of a pink silk negligée somehow sets aflame a desire which, until this unrestrained moment, we have not known existed! Dormant desires, unknown even to ourselves; but how full of possibilities!14
Beholding the pink silk, the shopper realizes she yearns to be not merely a practical housewife but an enticingly feminine seductress. She achieves that identity, if only in her imagination, by buying the negligee. It provides the cladding to the armature of her unspoken desire.
Glamour takes many forms because both the objects that embody such longings and the longings themselves—the cladding and the armature—vary from person to person. If the yearning to belong to an elite is the armature, for one person the cladding may be the image of US Marines as “the few, the proud”; for another it’s getting past the bouncer and into the city’s hottest club; for another it’s matriculating at Harvard; and for yet another it’s joining that movie trope, the “hand-picked team” of heroes. One would-be writer finds a display of Moleskine journals irresistibly glamorous while another is drawn to a photo of a mountain retreat or “a little attic in Paris with a skylight.”15
Different audiences may also have different underlying desires, meaning that both armature and cladding vary. For some, nothing is more glamorous than a red-carpet entrance lit by camera flashes; others project themselves into the peaceful solitude of a lone kayaker or a Zen garden. Bollywood films offer one set of fantasies for the rural villager imagining urban wealth and another for the overseas urbanite longing for an idealized homeland.16 An adult fan of superhero comics contrasts himself with other subscribers to an e-mail list called Glamour, whose predominantly gay members include many in the entertainment industry. “Their idea of glamour would be to get invited to the right party,” he says. “To me growing up, the idea of glamour was to be the guy who could save the right party from a meteor.”17 Their vision expresses the desire for exclusivity and social recognition, his for power, adventure, and significance.
Regardless of the form it takes, glamour reveals emotional truths. It shows us what we find lacking in real life and who we want to be. The glamour of celebrity arises from the desire for admiration, adulation, and love: the yearning to be recognized as important. The glamour of fashion appeals to our desire for transformation, promising a makeover of our lives or our selves as well as our appearance. The glamour of luxury comes not only from the lure of material pleasures but also from the suggestion that we could gracefully fit into the setting to which they belong. However illusory its particulars, glamour is always emotionally authentic.
By figuring out how glamour answers a particular audience’s longings, we can see how it operates and why it can arise in such seemingly unlikely places as superhero comic books—or convents. If you think glamour is all about diamonds and sex appeal, there are few less likely exemplars than a nun sworn to poverty and chastity. Yet so common is (or was) the glamorization of nuns that it has caused problems for real-life sisters. “It was the icon of veiled, virtuous virginity that audiences flocked to” in movies about nuns, “not the complicated women behind them,” writes Rebecca Sullivan, a scholar who has studied portrayals of nuns in American popular culture. In the mid-twentieth century, she notes, nuns had an “aura of sacrificial glamour.”18
At least that’s how the young Mary Gordon saw them: as the most glamorous of women. As much as she enjoyed her Grace Kelly paper dolls and her cowgirl costume, the author writes of her childhood in the 1950s, her “nun doll and the nun book had a special shimmer. They made me feel exalted and apart.” Her father would brag, “My daughter will either be a nun or a lady of the night.”
I didn’t know what a lady of the night was. It sounded glamorous, but no more glamorous than the image of a nun. He and I had a party piece about nuns. He would say, “Honey, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I would say, without skipping a beat, “A contemplative.” . . .
I had had a glimpse of a real contemplative, a glimpse that would press itself into the hot wax of my imagination. . . . I went into the chapel with my parents. From the back I could see one of the nuns kneeling in prayer. Her form was impeccable: back straight, hands folded, head bowed for the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. A beam of light fell on her. And I knew that saturation in pure light was the most desirable state in the world.
As a teenager, Gordon tangled with the real nuns who were her teachers, but maintained her glamorous vision of the religious life thanks to movie images. Although a Jewish friend was appalled by the restrictive convent portrayed in The Nun’s Story (1959), starring Audrey Hepburn as the brilliant Sister Luke, Gordon “found it enchanting—the silences, the gliding walk, above all the belief in perfection. . . . Whatever Sister Luke’s life is, it is not trivial. Whether she succeeds or fails, the stakes involved are the highest.”19 To feel “exalted and apart,” to be saturated in pure light, to believe in perfection, and above all, to matter. These are desires utterly at odds with the social envy portrayed by Berger. Like advertising images, the glamour of nuns unquestionably sold something to its audience, but that something was not the promise of social status.
Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story (1959): Like advertising images, the glamour of nuns unquestionably sold something to its audience, but that something was not the promise of social status.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
The yearning to matter—the desire for significance—is as common and deeply felt as any material craving. It informs the glamour of military service, sports, the art world, the intellectual life, and, in some cases, celebrity. It often accompanies another longing. Contrary to Berger’s obsession with envy, which he calls “a solitary form of reassurance,” many forms of glamour tap a desire for fellowship and belonging.20 The “glamour of camaraderie” that D. H. Lawrence condemned as “the glamour of Homer and of all militarism” takes peaceful forms as well. When Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), the protagonist of Midnight in Paris (2011), finds himself suddenly transported to the Paris of the 1920s, he not only meets his literary idols but is instantly accepted and encouraged by them. Unlike Gil’s dismissive fiancée, these important, accomplished people understand his longings and cherish his talents. It’s a deeply appealing fantasy.
In it we see not only the allure of the Paris of A Moveable Feast but also of Camelot, Hogwarts, the Galt’s Gulch of Atlas Shrugged, the Algonquin Roundtable, or the Star Trek universe—any setting where audience members who normally feel alienated from everyday reality can imagine themselves honored and at home. Star Trek’s allure may be lost on fashionistas but for the right audience, the show’s distant and idealized universe offers its own glamour, arising from the graceful, mysterious setting: a future where today’s conflicts and frustrations have disappeared. In the Star Trek universe, people no longer have to worry about distance, disease, money, energy supplies, racial conflict, stupid bosses, or disrespectful and bullying peers. “I never really fantasized about being the captain of the Enterprise,” writes Kevin Curran, a Chicago lawyer who runs a Star Trek blog. “I just fantasized about living on the Enterprise, surround[ed] by these people who treated each other the way I wanted to be treated.”21
Like studio-era movies, the Star Trek universe addresses not one but many different kinds of desire. It offers “both belonging and escape.”
The Light Works/Tobias Richter
Like studio-era movies, this fictional setting addresses not one but many different kinds of desire. It offers the obvious allure of adventure and exploration, along with Star Trek’s famously inclusive vision of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” But many fans cite another, less remarked-upon appeal, analogous to the glamorous portrayal of married affection in old movies: the idea of a highly functional, meritocratic workplace where “everyone has a role, and is important.”22 Star Trek, says a female fan, offers a way “to escape and do it by being on a ship where there is a place for me, where I have a useful skill and can contribute to the mission.” Its appeal lies in “both belonging and escape.”23
“You’ve always had a hard time finding a place in this world, haven’t you? Never knowing your true worth,” Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood) tells the young Jim Kirk (Chris Pine) in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, encouraging him to enlist in Starfleet. “You can settle for something less, an ordinary life. Or do you feel like you were meant for something better? Something special.”
Something special. That longing links Star Trek to fashionable partygoers, faithful Marines, and contemplative nuns. It is the promise of at once standing out as special and fitting into a group that shares your values and recognizes your worth. The glamour of this promise is often strong enough to sustain subcultures of devotees who create real-world fellowships around it. The Star Trek conventions, costumes, and collectibles that seem eccentric to outsiders (and to self-aware fans) serve the same emotional purposes for that audience that car shows, couture gowns, or postcards of Paris serve for theirs. Such activities and artifacts transform projection into participation, giving utopia a tactile presence.
This, then, is what glamour does as rhetoric. It focuses preexisting, largely unarticulated desires on a specific object, intensifying longing. It thus allows us to imaginatively inhabit the ideal and, as a result, to believe—at least for a moment—that we can achieve it in real life. It persuades us that the life we long for is almost within our grasp. Glamour is defined not by the specific desires it promotes but by the process of projection and sense of yearning it creates and, as we’ll explore in subsequent chapters, by the recurring elements that generate that projection and yearning: the promise of escape and transformation; grace; and mystery. Many different glamorous objects can spark similar emotions, because they appeal to different personalities and different ideals.
In embodying the ideal, glamorous objects represent a special case of what the cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken calls “displaced meaning.” Every culture, he observes, maintains ideals that can never be fully realized in everyday life, from Christian charity to economic equality. These ideals may uphold incompatible principles, deny the relation of cause and effect, require impossible knowledge, or demand more consistent or emotionally contradictory behavior than human beings can sustain. Yet for all their empirical failings, such cultural ideals supply essential purpose and meaning, offering identity and hope. To preserve and transmit them, cultures develop images and stories that portray a world in which their ideals are realized—a paradise, a utopia, a golden age, a promised land, a world to come (whether after death, the Messiah, the Second Coming, the Revolution, or the Singularity). McCracken writes:
When they are transported to a distant cultural domain, ideals are made to seem practicable realities. What is otherwise unsubstantiated and potentially improbable in the present world is now validated, somehow “proven,” by its existence in another, distant one.24
The mythmaking of displaced meaning gives cultures the characters, artifacts, geography, and emotions that make their cherished abstractions seem attainable and true, while keeping those ideals safely removed from the constraints and compromises of real life. Through common myths, legends, rituals, and spectacles, a culture’s members feel connected to these distant realms and the ideals they represent.
Photofest
Glamour represents a way through which individuals access personal versions of displaced meaning. Angelina Jolie’s “life narrative” embodies Naomi Wolf’s picture of ideal womanhood. To its fans, Star Trek portrays the ideal workplace. Your dream house represents not just a dwelling but your concept of the ideal family life, the ideal job, the ideal self—of happiness, significance, tranquility, love, and fulfillment. Hence the glamour of home-interiors magazines and the ads that fill them. These images lead the viewer to think, Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, as Meghan Daum titled her humorous memoir of a life obsessed with moving and remodeling in a search for “domestic integrity.”25
Like rituals and myths, glamour, too, makes the ideal seem available and real. But rather than striking awe, providing didactic lessons, or simply demonstrating the plausibility of cultural values, glamour sparks imaginative projection. It intensifies individual yearning. That emotional effect distinguishes it from other ways of accessing displaced meaning. So, too, does its individualistic nature. Whether the ideals it evokes are idiosyncratic or widely shared, glamour always arises from an individual’s subjective reaction. New types of glamour may catalyze new subcultures—or, as we’ll see in chapter seven, even reshape the dominant culture—by representing previously undefined versions of displaced meaning. But their power depends on the individual’s response.
Since owning a component of the dream makes the entire ideal seem like something we can someday claim, McCracken argues, commercial goods often serve as “bridges to these hopes and ideals.”26 Such bridges are thus likely objects of glamour. The perfect house may be out of reach, but you can buy the perfect stove; the writer’s retreat may be only a dream, but you can still have a great notebook. Like Viking ranges and Moleskine notebooks, such tangible, commercial “bridges” may themselves be glamorous. Or they may remind us of some form of glamour. In the 1930s, middle-class families in New York would hire specialty businesses to install elaborate padded satin headboards and matching quilted satin comforters in their bedrooms. “The headboard was the most glamorous thing you could have. It came right out of the movies,” says Joan Kron, who later became a prominent style journalist, recalling her childhood apartment. “When you had that you thought you were Joan Crawford or Ginger Rogers.”27
By its nature, however, displaced meaning is always out of reach. We can hold only the representative, not the ideal itself. Remembering the “amazing dresses” a former ballroom-dancing partner made for her, the competitive dancer and dance scholar Juliet McMains writes, “It was never as much fun being in the dress as it was imagining being in the dress, touching it from afar. The dress was a symbol of Glamour, but it was not Glamour itself. Glamour cannot be caught inside a dress. It is elusive, always slipping away just when it seems within grasp.”28 The otherwise practical housewife who splurges on a negligee may feel beautiful in it, but she will also find that a new garment is not a new life. The inarticulate longings remain, waiting to be reawakened by the next glamorous object. Offering foreplay, not fulfillment, glamour heightens desire.
One reason glamour constantly reemerges in new forms is that the process of projection, yearning, and pursuit is itself pleasurable. That experience represents a version of what the sociologist Colin Campbell calls “modern, self-illusory hedonism.” Unlike the sensation-seeking hedonism of food, drink, and sex, Campbell argues, the insatiability of modern consumption comes from the pursuit of emotional pleasure. Rather than a hedonism that repeats familiar sensations, this modern version is a process in which people first enjoy anticipating new experiences and the goods that convey them. In this kind of hedonism, Campbell writes, “the individual is much more an artist of the imagination,” turning images from the real world into daydreams in which flaws have been edited out and “happy coincidences” become routine. The result is “an illusion which is known to be false but felt to be true”—an important characteristic of glamour as well (emphasis added). This imaginative illusion creates “a longing to experience in reality those pleasures created and enjoyed in imagination, a longing which results in the ceaseless consumption of novelty.”29
As Campbell describes it, modern, self-illusory hedonism sounds the same as glamour. But as the Venn diagram illustrates, the overlap isn’t perfect. Glamour always implies reaching for displaced meaning; it promises not just pleasure but an experience of the ideal. It’s possible to enjoy imagining a new experience that would fit easily into your existing life and doesn’t represent anything greater than itself: eating in a new restaurant, for instance, or upgrading your iPhone to the latest model. Such pleasurable contemplation represents modern, self-illusory hedonism but not glamour. It suggests no real change from current circumstances, let alone a connection to displaced meaning.
Photo by Grey Crawford, interior design by Darryl Wilson
Conversely, as a way of accessing displaced meaning, glamour encompasses experiences that, while imaginable, aren’t even theoretically possible and so fall outside Campbell’s concept. Audiences may project themselves into becoming Angelina Jolie, living in 1920s Paris, or joining the Starship Enterprise’s crew. Like glamour, Campbell’s “modern self-illusory hedonism” fosters projection and longing, and it, too, relies on mystery and grace. But it’s too connected to the real world to encompass every form of glamour.
Still, the pleasures of modern, self-illusory hedonism do include contemplating experiences that are theoretically possible but practically out of reach. Belying Berger’s crabbed notion of social envy, Campbell notes that “people regularly enjoy looking at pictures of products which they cannot—nor are ever likely to be able to—afford.” Such contemplation offers pleasures of its own, many of which derive from the momentary experience of glamour. We see glamorous clothes, cars, or homes and imagine how good it would feel to inhabit them.
The problem comes when people can act on their longings and the details of reality collide with the edited fantasy. “I fall for the awesome four-inch heels every time, hoping to strut around like an archetypal fashion girl,” says the London retailing executive Joanna Jeffreys. The sight of the shoes lifts her out of everyday reality and into a more exciting world, promising to transform her into a head-turning icon with limousines on call and the grace to maneuver in footwear designed for show. “But then morning comes,” she continues, “and the idea of running for the number 10 bus in my Alaïa stingray-skin platforms doesn’t seem so appealing.”30 If she couldn’t afford the shoes, she’d never fully grasp how impractical they are. But since she does buy them, she has to face their limitations.
Campbell argues that such disillusionment is inevitable. As a result, he says, “the modern hedonist is continually withdrawing from reality as fast as he encounters it, ever-casting his day-dreams forward in time, attaching them to objects of desire, and then subsequently ‘unhooking’ them from these objects as and when they are attained and experienced.”31
Since the audience isn’t actually fooled, however, sometimes the symbol is enough. “The value of the good is not purely illusory,” argues the sociologist Jens Beckert, taking issue with Campbell. “Indeed, when goods become material representations of otherwise abstract or distant events, values and ideals, they offer a mental realization of the desired. The symbolically charged good evokes sensations that virtually embody the realization of the desired state.” The absurdly impractical shoes may never be worn, but they still offer a bridge to an ideal self and thus, their beauty aside, a source of ongoing pleasure. Besides, Beckert argues, merely striving to achieve the ideal can, in itself, be rewarding: “Striving and attaining are not strictly separate from each other.”32
Glamour not only inspires consumer purchases or pleasurable daydreams. It can also move people to life-changing positive action. As flamboyant boys alienated from their “gritty, violent hometown” of Reading, England, Simon Doonan (now creative ambassador-at-large at Barneys) and his friend Biddie (now a successful drag performer) “saw glamour and modish excitement in the faraway and only boredom and dreariness in the here and now.” They imagined, Doonan writes, an ideal life among the Beautiful People celebrated in glossy magazines.
These effortlessly stylish trendsetters owned sprawling palazzos in Rome and ultragroovy pied-à-terres in Chelsea. They slept in six-foot circular beds covered with black satin sheets and white Persian cats. The Beautiful People were thin and gorgeous, and they had lots and lots and lots of thick hair, and their lives seemed to be about a hundred million times more screechingly fabulous than Biddie’s life and mine combined. They did not work much, but they had buckets and buckets of money, which they spent on things like champagne and caftans and trips to Morocco to buy caftans.
Reinfried Marass
Inspired by these images, the two friends left for London in the early 1970s, strapping to the top of the car the object that best represented the glamorous new life they sought: a “massive, rhubarb-colored floor pillow.”
The Beautiful People all had floor pillows. We knew they did. We had seen the Beautiful People lolling on their squishy floor pillows in trendy Sunday magazine spreads. Even if a Beautiful Person was photographed sitting on a couch or a tuffet or a poof, there was inevitably a floor pillow in the background. If we had any hope of being accepted by the Beautiful People, we needed that floor pillow. It was a calling card of sorts.33
However absurd it came to seem in retrospect, back home in Reading, the floor pillow had provided tangible proof that the life of the Beautiful People really existed and that the two friends might claim it. The floor pillow was a bridge to otherwise distant ideals.
When Doonan finally met the Beautiful People, they turned out to be boring and unimpressive. But by inspiring his and Biddie’s move to London, their glamorous images led the two friends to find new and satisfying lives that would have been impossible in Reading. Glamour is an illusion and, according to its critics, a dangerous snare. But because it recognizes and concentrates real desires, the mirage can also prove a valuable, life-enhancing inspiration.
Glamour, we can now say, is a form of nonverbal rhetoric, an illusion “known to be false but felt to be true.” It focuses inchoate desires and embodies them in the image or idea of a person, a setting, an artifact, or occasionally a concept. By inviting projection and making the ideal feel attainable, the glamorous image intensifies longing and, in some cases, moves the audience to action. Glamour can take many forms, because there are many kinds of desire and because the same desire can be expressed in multiple ways.
Elizabeth Taylor in X,Y, and Zee (1972): The “Beautiful People” all had caftans and floor pillows.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
This describes what glamour does but only begins to say what it is. It does not tell us how to construct glamour and only begins to suggest how glamour, with its connection to displaced meaning, differs from other types of nonverbal persuasion: a photo of a frosty glass of beer on a hot summer’s day, for instance. We now turn to the defining elements of glamour, beginning with how it answers a multiplicity of desires with the same essential promise.
“Dress Up in Dreams” says the sign adorning the Disney Store’s display of princess costumes. It’s a persuasive invitation. In 2011 alone, the company sold $3 billion in Disney Princess merchandise, from dolls and dresses to backpacks and beds.1 It got into the business almost by accident. In 2000, the new head of the company’s consumer products division noticed that many of the girls attending a Disney on Ice show had cobbled together their own princess costumes. The next day he gave his team a mandate: to churn out products that would allow “girls to do what they’re doing anyway: projecting themselves into the characters from the classic movies.”2 The glamour came first, the merchandising later.
It’s a truism: Every little girl dreams of being a princess. (A Google search for that exact phrase turns up more than 821,000 instances.3) The power of the archetype predates Disney’s marketing machine and will no doubt outlive it, because to play princess is to embrace two eternally alluring promises: You are special and Life can be wonderful. Those promises are princess glamour’s stable emotional core. But what exactly they mean changes with audience and circumstances.
Courtesy of Everett Collection
Long before Disney reimagined Snow White and Cinderella, the fairy tales on which those movies were based portrayed princesses as special creatures, blessed (and sometimes cursed) beyond the experiences of regular folk. A princess was beautiful, honored, and, by dint of birth or marriage, rich. In a world far less affluent than our own, to be a princess meant escaping poverty and hardship—an association that persisted well into the twentieth century. “I’ll live like a princess in a house that runs like magic,” declares the excited housewife depicted in a World War II–era American Gas Association ad, describing her “post-war dream.”4
Playing on these associations, mass marketers in the 1920s used obscure European princesses to lend an aristocratic aura to their products, infusing everyday experiences with glamour. A Pond’s cold cream ad featuring Princesse Marie de Bourbon of Spain described her “patrician-white” skin as having “the delicacy of the jasmine flower that blooms in the tangled depths of old, neglected Catalonian gardens.”5 Princess Giambattista Rospigliosi (née Ethel Bronson of Manhattan) declared that only Lux soap was good enough for laundering the precious lace of her great-grandmother’s wedding veil.6
While the wealth and status of real-world royalty once gave the archetype much of its allure, by the late twentieth century the archetype had glamorized actual royalty, with all the illusion that implies. Having grown up on Barbara Cartland romance novels, the young Diana Spencer fantasized to a friend that marrying Prince Charles “could be quite fun. It would be like Anne Boleyn or Guinevere!” (The fates of these two legendary ladies prompted the response, “I bloody hope not!”) When she did marry the prince, Diana reified her princess fantasies in her famous wedding dress. “She would be a fairy bride for her father and her Prince,” writes Tina Brown in her biography of the princess. “Those creamy ruffles and ivory frills would float her away from the agonies of the present to a future of certain love.”7
The 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, whose own glamorous vision of life as a princess was drawn from Barbara Cartland romance novels.
Rex Features/Courtesy of Everett Collection
In the years since Diana, the princess archetype has become even more detached from the privileges of real-life royalty. When supermodel Kate Moss’s daughter, Lila, then four years old, met actual princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the little girl was not impressed. “How come if you are princesses you don’t have tiaras and a pink dress?” she demanded.8 As for the public’s new favorite princess, the limited glamour of Kate Middleton, now the duchess of Cambridge, lies in her poise, wholesome attractiveness, and impeccable personal style. Her marriage to Prince William is just the way she became famous, not a fantasy in itself. Fans crave her great hair more than her royal status. She could just as well be the latest ingenue actress.
As the unimpressed young Lila demonstrates, princess glamour has largely become a childhood fantasy. It represents a feminine version of the appeal Michael Chabon, in his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, ascribes to superheroes. Princesses, too, express the “lust for power and the gaudy sartorial taste of a race of powerless people with no leave to dress themselves.”9 For some young girls, playing princess is, in fact, merely the stage before playing superhero.10 Like the superhero, the princess has a special identity, destiny, and costume. She is more than an ordinary girl.
Among today’s educated urbanites, however, princess glamour is suspect. The postfeminist mothers of princess-besotted little girls worry that the archetype teaches their daughters to be pretty and helpless, waiting for a prince to rescue them instead of acting on their own behalf. “I don’t want my daughter to be a princess; I don’t want her to be girly or silly, or anything that is attributed to princess idolatry,” declares the feminist blogger Marina DelVecchio, the mother of a princess-loving three-year-old. “I want her to be strong and intelligent, fiery and confident.”11
A more sanguine contemporary mother, blogger Sasha Brown-Worsham, observes, “ ‘Princess culture’ is what you make it.”12 The princess archetype comes in many versions—one reason for its power and persistence. Iconic princesses range from the domestic Cinderella to the warrior Xena, from the cleverly faithful Penelope to the dangerously beautiful Helen, from feisty Princess Leia to the many cinematic reinventions of Elizabeth Tudor. The 2012 movie Snow White and the Huntsman reimagines its heroine as a good-hearted, relatively plain rebel leader.13 Wonder Woman is both superhero and princess.
Beyond feeling special, what it means to dream of being a princess depends largely on the dreamer. “When I was a kid, my best friend and I dressed up as princesses,” recalls a blog commenter. “In our play we were always kidnapped by the bad guys and had to use our kickass martial arts and fencing skills to escape. While wearing pretty dresses.”14
In the mid-twentieth century, jet airplanes and rocket ships were the glamorous visual symbols of technological optimism. Their images lent excitement to car ads and diner décor, children’s pajamas and packages of sewing needles. Jets and rockets were everywhere, promising a bright future. Then in the pessimistic 1970s, these once-iconic forms disappeared from common view. “The future” no longer seemed so glamorous. We were doomed, it seemed, to ecological catastrophe if not nuclear war. “Natural” was in; hard, mechanical forms were out. Besides, jets and rockets were old news.
Three decades later, their successor emerged. Wind turbine images are the new evocative symbols of technological hope. Their graceful forms adorn ads for everything from Volkswagen to Aveda, Skyy vodka to Goldman Sachs. On Shutterstock, the world’s largest subscription-based stock-photo agency, turbines are nearly as popular as the long-iconic lightbulb.1
For the people who create them, the images represent grace and beauty. “They’re among my favorite things to photograph,” says Sandra Santos, who sells cards with dreamy photos of California windmills against a purpling sky. But like the stylized rockets of the mid-twentieth century, turbines have meanings that go beyond their immediate aesthetic pleasure. For Santos, as for many others, they “are iconic images of a world moving forward.”2 When Spike Lee directed a 2010 TV commercial for the left-leaning news network MSNBC, a shot of windmills appeared as the voiceover affirmed “the freedom to believe that our best days are still ahead.”3
Policy wonks assume the current rage for wind farms has something to do with efficiently reducing carbon emissions. So they spend their time debating load mismatches and transmission losses. These practical discussions miss the emotional point. To their most ardent advocates, and increasingly to the public at large, wind turbines aren’t just about generating electricity. They’re symbols of an ideal world—longing disguised as problem solving.
Like rockets and jets, wind turbines combine sleek, graceful lines with the mystery of newness and distance. Few of us have direct experience with them, and fewer still understand exactly how they work. But we know what they mean. Turbines, in the words of singer Thomas Dolby, tell us to “dream big, imagining a beautiful future for our children, despite all the evidence that says they’re doomed.”4
iStockphoto
As emblems of technological progress, today’s wind turbines embody a different dream from those midcentury jets and rockets. While the old icons zoomed forward toward some unseen but surely wonderful destination, the new ones move yet remain stationary. Turbine images promise progress without change, simultaneously appealing to the original idea of sustainability—a steady-state world without economic growth—and to the popular desire for prosperity and abundance. These new icons of eco-consciousness cater to what Al Gore denounced in Earth in the Balance as “the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle, and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary” to avoid catastrophic climate change.5 They promise that a green future will be just as pleasant as today, only cleaner and more elegant.
Like other forms of glamour, turbine images represent the world not as it is but as we would like it to be. In stock-photo glamour shots, wind power seems clean, free, and infinitely abundant. Turbines spin silently, while the wind blows constantly and in exactly the right amount. The sky is unfailingly photogenic, a backdrop of either puffy clouds or a brilliant sunset; the landscape is both empty and beautiful; and there are no transmission lines anywhere.
In the real world, wind farms face growing resistance. Some critics consider them the equivalent of the supersonic Concorde jet: an inspiring technology, perhaps, but an economically inefficient way of getting the job done and, thus, a subsidy-dependent boondoggle. Other opposition comes from people who live near potential sites. Some neighbors object to the noise, while others find wind turbines ugly.6
While the fashion for wind-turbine images feeds positive public feelings about actual turbines, image is not reality. The question is whether, having become glamorous icons, wind turbines will eventually become as common (and hence unglamorous) as jets—or whether they’ll prove the latest incarnation of flying cars and electricity too cheap to meter.