One of my university lecturers once said no one should be thought frivolous for following fashion. Fashion, she said, reflected the zeitgeist of an era and offered social commentary through dress. She certainly would have loved Stephen Gundle’s elegant tome.
For Gundle, however, fashion is merely one medium through which ”glamour” is designed, manufactured and communicated — much as it is through art, literature, film and the mass media. Glamour is the careful construction of fantasy, mass marketed through all these platforms, and both glamour and Glamour are enigmatic and fascinating.
In an attempt to define ”glamour”, Gundle takes us from the courts of Louis XVI to Napoleon (one of the first true architects of glamour), through the rise of the Parisian courtesans, on to the formation of Hollywood and the birth of the paparazzi and finally arrives at the dreadful incarnation of modern glamour, Paris Hilton.
The book is ambitious, particularly as glamour is difficult to define, something Gundle acknowledges in his introduction. It has ”talismanic qualities”, enhancing those who possess it. It is conflictingly described in the press as something inherent, while simultaneously being something acquired with study and money.
It is accessible because the public can consume it through the media and copy it to some extent through glamorous commodities, but for many years it remained the exclusive terrain of high birth and it still remains, to a large extent, the terrain of the well-heeled.
But as Gundle points out time and again, glamour feeds the imagination through escapism, sex appeal or the instant gratification of consumption. As hereditary social hierarchies broke down across the globe, and as mass media and mass production evolved, glamour took on more complicated forms.
And Gundle does not shy away from its explicit link to the age of consumption. To sell you needed glamour, in buying you became glamorous. Its link to sex, and the blatant commodification of women, is key to the evolution of glamour.
As highlighted in the third chapter, Paris and its once most famous attractions, its courtesan performers, saw glamour attached to women who performed for their admirers and sold themselves for an extraordinary price.
They aggressively courted the burgeoning press, they were a status symbol for men who had money, whether old or new, and they knew their value. Grundle points out that one courtesan, Caroline Otero, is reputed to have insured her legs for $80 000 each, a massive sum in the late 1800s.
Modern parallels to the city’s Beverly Hills-reared namesake, Paris Hilton, are inevitable (although she has yet to insure a body part). Hilton’s sexual dalliances are broadcast via the internet, with no payment involved except the furthering of her notoriety and the public’s interest in her. Yet the glamorous link between Paris and Paris, so to speak, is still there.
”Like glamorous figures of the past, she [Hilton] is an astute merchandiser of herself,” says Gundle. Hilton ”is the current embodiment of society’s fascination with rich, beautiful, exhibitionist women”.
The examination of glamour is located chiefly in the United States and Europe, specifically in cities such as London, Paris and Rome. The supposition is that it was in these urban centres that glamour began. He acknowledges, if briefly, that ”glamour” played its part in associating all things Western with all things good, advanced and beautiful.
As theatre became more mainstream and Hollywood took off, glamour became increasingly professionalised and manufactured.
Marlene Dietrich, an icon of glamour, famously stated that glamour is ”something indefinite, something inaccessible to normal women — an unreal paradise, desirable but basically out of reach”. But, as Gundle reveals, that is not the case. It is, he states, almost always a ”fusion — if often a problematic one — of class and sleaze, of high style and lowly appeals”.
He delves into the construction of the female image as the purveyor of glamour, but as society alters so does the formation and reconstruction of that image. He also illustrates how glamour speaks to and is heard by women.
And herein lies my one misgiving about the book. There is little exploration of the effects the ”glamour industry” has had on women, specifically Western women, their perceptions of themselves and their position in society.
But maybe this is because the work’s chief concern is glamour, not women. Nor does it descend into any moral judgement of the architects of glamour and the billions of people who pursue it.
That smidgen of unease aside, Glamour is an informative read. It is filled with vignettes that are interesting and startling and gives us a view of a changing world through the lens of glamour. It is peopled with some of our most interesting political and cultural icons, from Lord Byron to Jackie Kennedy-ÂOnassis and Princess Diana.
Gundle points out that with the advent of technology and the easy access to all things glamorous, glamour itself is becoming ”ever less elusive”. As long as we have cash in hand, however, and aspirations of a better life, glamour will sustain itself. Whether that is good or bad, who knows?
