Deep Glamour: At the Intersection of Imagination & Desire

DG Contest--Win a Copy of Forgotten Fashion

  Win a copy of Forgotten Fashion  signed by Kate and Andraé by being the first person to tell us--via EMAIL to contest-at-deepglamour.net, NOT in the comments--what 1950s line of appliances (including the manufacturer) was promoted using Oleg Cassini's "Sheer Look" gowns as an advertising tie-in. The winner will be announced next week. 

Sarah Palin on the Ticket and in Vogue

DG missed this issue.

Gov. Sarah Palin,  just announced as McCain's running mate, did indeed pose for Vogue last December.

Vogue's breathless caption read:

Besides being telegenic, she had a tough-girl Alaskan resume that most politicians could only dream of - the protein her family eats comes from fish she has pulled out of the ocean with her own hands and caribou she has shot.

But the cover? Alas, no.  She was joined by daughters Willow, Bristol and Piper for a spread on the inside of the February book.

Slate's Timothy Noah has the backstory on  Palin.

Fruits of Their Labors: WPA Art

In honor of the Labor Day weekend,  DG invites our readers to ponder the legacy of the WPA.

The Library of Congress has a great collection of posters --the one seen here was created for the Federal Art Project's Index of American Design exhibit in Ohio.

Murals in public buildings abound, but in various states of preservation.   

The WPA also built golf courses, swimming pools, and even a circus.

(The government is still in the circus business, some might argue.)

Laura Hapke's book, Labor's Canvas,  is an engrossing study of labor art,  from both an art history and social history view, which sounds very academic, but don't be deterred.  Well worth the effort. 

Guest Blogger: Kate Hahn on Forgotten Fashion

After tackling such subjects as how to avoid a lion attack and why other breakfast cereals should replace Cheerios as finger-food for babies, hunting down answers to the burning questions about Ugly Betty, and cross-examining  self-described "tactless" knitter and "bad mama" Paulina Porizkova about America's Next Top Model, L.A. writer Kate Hahn decided to make her mark as a fashion historian. In her just-released book, Forgotten Fashion, she plumbs the "Beatrice P. Fruit Archives" at the "College of the Willows" for such once-celebrated fashion fads as Ice Beading and the Four O'Clock Dress.

It's deadpan social satire in a tone Hahn describes as "glamorous dark humor...inspired by things like Edward Gorey and the Limony Snicket series." In each of the supposedly historic episodes, everything goes wonderfully until some sort of "regrettable incident or unlucky moment" ends the fun. Here, with illustrations by Andraé Gonzalo of Project Runway fame, is a sample chapter, with a special offer at the end. [VP]

Frigidaire Formals, 1950

Sometimes, it all begins with a muse.

When Gaston Darchez first laid eyes on Kaitlyn Anderson, she was removing a silver tray of Jell-O parfaits from a sparkling new 1950 Frigidaire Imperial refrigerator. Kaitlyn was six feet tall, with flame red hair and skin so white that it had been alternately described by her series of minor poet boyfriends as "milky," "snowy," "ghostly," or by the less metaphorically inclined, "pale." Her long spine gave her a slightly concave posture, which had once led her pediatrician to predict a lifetime of expensive medical treatments. But by the time 21 year-old Kaitlyn crossed Darchez’s line of vision, her backbone had become her fortune.

Kaitlyn was one of the few people in the world with the innate ability to hold her torso in a nearly perpetual C-curve, which at the time was considered the ultimate posture of a high-fashion model. She had been discovered by an art director, and embarked on a very successful career posing for illustrated magazine advertisements. It was in this capacity that Darchez, an expatriate French former fashion designer, first saw her. He had been hired to draw the ad for the 1950 Frigidaire Imperial. Kaitlyn had been contracted to be part of the picture. Her elegant form, swathed in a sky blue ball gown and curved over the tray of gelatin treats, suggested that the icy confines of the refrigerator emitted breezes that could transform anyone’s life into a glamorous one, and give pedigree to even the most pedestrian desserts.

For Darchez, the scene was simply a series of colors and shapes to be put on paper, until the moment Kaitlyn unwound from her C-curve, and stood up straight. "She dominated the entire room," he wrote. "And I knew what I had to do to become a fashion designer again: go big." The Frenchman had worked in all the great Parisian fashion ateliers, but was never chosen as an assistant, and so had come to the US, bitter and angry, promising to abandon couture and "become an illustrator of the hulking monstrous machines and the lazy and wasteful women who use them." But in truth he was haunted by the popularity of Christian Dior’s New Look of 1947 and longed to create a style that would have the same meteoric impact on fashion.

At the sight of Kaitlyn beside the modern ice box, he decided "hope lies in hugeness." The drawing studio had the same high ceilings as the abodes of the Parisian elite – Darchez’s desired customers. He knew that all of these privileged women harbored the same secret wish: to enter the elaborate parties held in these cavernous rooms in gowns so stunning they would make all the other guests blend into the parquet floors. To become their next design darling, Darchez would have to make dresses that would dominate these spaces like no one before him: evening gowns on a gargantuan scale. "Double doors will become triples to accommodate their entrances, and grand staircases will look like matchstick ladders beside them," he wrote. "I will transform every woman into Kaitlyn."

Aaron Sorkin Sinks His Teeth into Facebook

Call me crazy, but I swear there's a connection here.

Aaron Sorkin has  a Facebook page,  because he's writing the Facebook movie.

and

The New York Times reports that people are getting their  unnaturally perfect capped teeth redone.

Evidently,  those big white Chiclets are the dental equivalent of the full Cleveland.

Why Don't You...Twitter?

Why Didn't We Think of This? dept:

Follow Diana Vreeland on Twitter.

Erin McKean is the clever girl.

Mrs. Vreeland wrote her Why Don't You column while at Harper's Bazaar, where she worked for twenty-six years, before joining Vogue in 1963,  just in time for all hell to break loose, in fashion and elsewhere.

DG.net has more planned on Mrs. V.,  so in the meantime, Twitter.

Mexico '68: Graphic Greatness

Daniel Hernandez, who's living in Mexico while  writing a book, alerts us to design greatness: the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.  The Museum of Modern Art there is hosting an exhibit on the design and graphics, and Hernandez writes:

The exhibit is a look at the extraordinary task the organizers had of convincing the world through the power of graphic design that Mexico was capable of hosting the '68 Games -- the first held in Latin America, the first held in a developing country, and first held in the Spanish-speaking world.

The Op-Art logo, which also referenced Huichol design,  grew out of the  entire design team effort.  Graphic artist Ed Fladung points out the contributions of Lance Wyman, who was responsible for the graphics.  Wyman says

It was designed by integrating the official five ring Olympic symbol into the number 68 to create a parallel ine typography that suggested imagery found in Mexican preHispanic art and Mexican folk art. The logotype powerfully expressed a sense of place and culture and visually exclaimed the Games were in Mexico.

That  sophisticated, abstract graphic identity was repeated by signage, publications, posters, tickets costumes  and even the torch.

Today, we're  accustomed to omnipresent corporate branding, and ignore it  as visual noise.  The Mexico '68 logo reminds us to respond to an exciting design.

More Futures Past

In 2005, Steve and I happened to catch this great exhibit, "Driving Through Futures Past," at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Although the highlight of the exhibit had to be the 1954 Bonneville Special (sorry for the low-quality of my snapshot), the real revelation was the art on the walls: concept car renderings done by mid-century car designers. (Here's a slide show of samples from the exhibition.) Although I'm far from a car buff and don't even like the fins-and-chrome look of mid-century cars that much, I loved both the aesthetic feel of the renderings and their exuberant futurism. What a great thing to collect, I thought. I wonder where you get them?

At the June Art Deco and Modernism Show in San Francisco, I met one of the sources: Leo Brereton, who has rescued many of these drawings from Detroit area basements and attics and sells them to collectors. (He also collects and sells original illustrations from pulp fiction and, as you can see from the photo, mid-century science fiction.) He talked to me about car renderings.

Q: How do you define what you collect and sell?

A: I deal in automotive concepts or renderings, which are the drawings done by the designers for the Big Three as well as independent automobile manufacturers, from the '30s through the '70s, with an emphasis on the '50s and '60s.

Q: Where do you get the drawings?

A: Primarily from the designers themselves. As a designer, you were not encouraged to keep the stuff you were working on. However, if you were the guy who worked for 24 years in the Buick Division and all of a sudden you were transferred to Cadillac, your boss might say, "All the stuff in these files that we haven't cleaned out in 20 years, if you want it fine. If not just throw it out."

There was no thought--not a moment's thought--at a place like GM that this archive might be important one day, that we should open up a museum, if nothing else to toot our own horn. That lack of vision is astounding. So routinely the work is now found in landfills across Metropolitan Detroit.

Q: How long have you been doing this?

A: About 10 years. There really wasn't a market for it when I started.

Q: And what do these represent to people who buy them today?

A: Visions of the past, examples of great designs. It's a nostalgia thing, as well as a clear recognition that this work has gone unrecognized.

I wound up buying several renderings by automotive designers from Leo. Here's a slide show. But only one of the drawings, by a Czech designer Leo knew nothing about, is of a car of the future. The rest take the glamour of high-speed transportation to the sea and to space, in inspiring but wildly impractical forms. When I showed them to our friend Greg Benford, the astrophysicist and hard science fiction writer, he rolled his eyes. Looking at the moon vehicle John Aiken (later famous for the Mercury Cougar) designed as a student project, he asked, "Why would you want streamlining in a place with no atmosphere?" For the same reason Golden Age Hollywood put actresses in gowns they couldn't sit down in and Cecil B. DeMille demanded high heels even for Paulette Goddard in Northwest Mounted Police--to transport viewers to a world that transcends the practicalities of real life.

Here's a gallery of renderings from designers' student days from a blog devoted to concept car art. And here's design critic Phil Patton on automotive illustrations.

The Secret to Glamorous Feet

First, you should buy shoes that are comfortable enough that you aren't in pain. But even the world's most comfy shoes, like these, can chafe--and limping around with blisters is not glamorous or even attractive. And, of course, it hurts. Band-Aids are only a slight improvement.

At our family's recent gay wedding, my shopping-savvy sister-in-law Debbie (not one of the brides) introduced me to the solution: Band-Aid's Blister-Block Stick. It worked like a charm, keeping my heels blister-free for hours in these shoes. Since the wedding, I've searched CVS, Target, Walgreens, and Wal-Mart in vain for Blister Block. I've tried online, even placing an order from one place, only to be told the product isn't in stock. I've emailed J&J, with no reply. Surely they haven't done away with the product. It's featured on the Band-Aid home page! (But the link goes to a page full of plastic strips.) If you know where to get it, please let me know. In the meantime, via Amazon, I did find a close substitute that seems to work (though I'm not convinced it holds up quite as long).

The shoes, btw, are these bargains, from DSW, which, alas, does not have an affiliates program that would allow DeepGlamour to get a cut of any sales. (Please do patronize our advertisers to the right, all of which are affiliates programs.)

A Soldier's Eye

"This eye is in the U.S. Army," writes photoblogger Rick Lee, who shot not only this photo but the one in today's version of the DG masthead.

More Chanel-chicanery: Shirley MacLaine Goes CoCo

Lifetime offers up a Chanel MOW which got bad reviews a month or two ago. All you need to know is what Lifetime's website tells you:

"Coco Chanel" is the rags-to-riches tale charting the rise of one of the most influential fashion icons of the 20th century. From her humble childhood in a French orphanage, through her early days as a young dressmaker's assistant, to her passionate and tragic love with a dashing Englishman, and ultimately to her success as a pioneering icon, "Coco Chanel" is the story of a glamorous woman who was hard to love and harder to ignore.

Somehow, I think I can ignore this with little or no effort.

Shirley MacLaine's a natural choice as she'd played a French streetwalker in Irma la Douce and thus, could manage the lingo. According to the NY Post, her accent slips like a supermodel on the catwalk.

MacLaine, ever the sensitive one, launched her own jewelry line, after being inspired by Chanel's jewels. Although I doubt that Mlle. ever said this:

The jewellery goes on the tops of the fingers, and these are all reflections of the chakras and our inner power.

Coco Chanel Chic Chick-Flick Filming in Sept.

According to Variety, the Coco Chanel bio-pic starts filming in Paris in September. Cute and cuddly Audrey Tautou ( last seen as a child of Jesus) will play the cute and notoriously not cuddly designer.

Director Anne Fontaine, is also adapting the script (with Camille Fontaine), from L'Irrégulière: Ou, Mon Itinéraire Chanel by Edmonde Charles-Roux, who's written umpteen different versions of the same life. Christopher Hampton (Atonement) is advising, on those sexy beach love scenes, no doubt.

Chanel Solitaire, a 1981 film starring Marie-France Pisier, wasn't a huge hit, and explored her early love life, before she became a legend. 

Taking no risks, this version won't go into her later life, either, perhaps for fear of those less attractive moments, such as in 1943, when she denouced her former Jewish business partners, the Wertheimers, to the Nazis, perhaps on the advice of her German lover, Hans Gunther von Dincklage. Later, arrested by the Resistance, she was released nearly immediately, and fled to Switzerland.  Since no one in France actually collaborated with the Nazis, this sort of sequence would be so difficult to film. She must have had vast amounts of charm--after the war, the Wertheimers re-negotiated their deal with her.

Chanel was her own best creation. She was a tough business woman, who thought about herself first and last.Make no mistake--she was a genius at design, marketing, and the making of an enduring image. She had no illusions about work, life, love or herself. Such a complex personality deserves better than a chick-flick.

(photo by Horst in 1935)

Hint: It's Not Bulgari

Why are Beverly Hills palm trees more glamorous than Westwood palm trees?

What's Outside Your Window?

When I first saw an ad for Rector Square in, I believe, the New York Times Magazine, I was struck not only by the glamour of its image but by a sense of familiarity. Didn't I have something similar in my files, something I'd clipped from D Magazine? I did indeed. An ad for another condo high-rise, the Metropolitan in downtown Dallas used almost the same composition.

The ads are the same, but they are also different (and not just because on has a man and the other a woman). As I observe in chapter one of my book-in-progress:

Wednesday Shades: Glamour from Gucci

The fastest way to look glamorous is to put on sunglasses. (Witness today's DG banner.) They make you look mysterious, prevent unattractive squinting, and cover dark circles better than the world's best concealer. They come in all shapes, colors, and personalities. No wonder they're the hot new accessory. Pick your persona.

Cool and elegant in a LBD:

Tan and timeless in a Diane von Furstenburg jungle-print wrap dress:

Rockin' that Juicy Couture (or T-shirted at Race for the Cure):

3000 Years of Art History While U Watch

If you were smart enough to listen to Linda Hirschman and majored in something more useful than art history, please watch and absorb.

(And thanks to Mr. G, who re-created the classic Mason Williams version.)

Quotable: Richard Rodriguez on L.A. Glamour

"There was nothing reticent about L.A. Glamour was instant. The city took its generosity from the movies. You're beautiful if L.A. says you’re beautiful, goddammit.

It was the sons of Jewish immigrants, the haberdasher's son and the tobacconist's son, who established the epic scale of the movies. Movies taught one big lesson: individual lives have scope and grandeur.

Of course L.A. is shallow. Lips that are ten feet long and faces that are forty feet high! But such faces magnify our lives, reassure us that single lives matter. The attention L.A. lavishes on a single face is as generous a metaphor as I can find for the love of God."

--Richard Rodriquez, Days of Obligation

Toronto Film Festival Selections Announced

The Toronto International Film Festival opens September 4, and will present 249 feature films, with 115 premiering. Trailers here.

David Poland has his own ideas as to what looks promising.

Anne Thompson makes a case for Viggo Mortensen in Appaloosa.

Jeffrey Wells tore himself away from the convention to make a list.

Karina Longworth made some early notes, but can be persuaded to reconsider.

Cinematical seems to want to see everything.

Tofilfest has a chart that will crash your browser, while ranking the selections.

But there's one documentary selection that everyone is waiting for, even if they won't admit it.

Amanda Lepore--Can You Hear Me Now?

Jawbone,  the  Bluetooth headset outfit, enlisted model/scenester Amanda Lepore in their recent ad campaign.  While Copyranter  decided the ad is effective, his commenters seemed a little unsure about Lepore.

I think she's fabulous. If anyone can work an earring as big as her lips, it's Amanda.

(And the WOW Report agrees.)

The Stars Are Just Like Us

John McCain isn't the only one trying to puncture Barack Obama's glamour. So is...Barack Obama.

"Barack Obama is lauded as everyman at Democratic convention" is the headline on this LAT story. The exotic background, cool exterior, and ethnic distance that helped create a glamorous aura in the early days (at least among white voters) have become potential liabilities in the general election. A glamorous icon enables audiences to project their hopes onto him--but they can also project their fears.

It's always been Michelle Obama's job to bring her husband's image back down to earth. She overdid it when she called him "stinky and snorey" and complained that he left dirty socks on the floor. That ordinary voters don't want--too much information. Last night's performance, however, was designed to create a more dignified image of Obama-as-regular-guy, mostly by association (the Robinsons as average American family). This was "Celebrities are just like us," going about their business shopping and taking their adorable kids to the park, not "Stars without makeup," looking sloppy and unattractive.

Towering over the microphone, Michelle was the picture of polished style. She has a model-like physique, made for elegant clothes, and obviously appreciates the shopping benefits of a salary in the range her husband Obama plans to sock with extra FICA taxes. People often compare her to Jackie Kennedy. But, she implicitly assured us last night, she won't be spending any summers cruising the Mediterranean with her princess sister on a Greek shipping tycoon's yacht. That kind of glamour today's politics won't tolerate.

[Photo via Barack Obama Flickr photostream under Creative Commons license.]

Glam or Spam?

 

Based only on the image--is this room Glam or Spam?

It's over the top, to be sure, but is it dreadful  ? Is it Louis-the-Hotel or Poule de Luxe or What Granny Would Do If She Had the Money?  Does it make a difference if you know who lives here?

Can bad taste ever be glamorous? Chime in, please.

The Future Is a Windmill

Sleek, pristine, and elegantly modern, the blades of an advanced windmill turn in an unseen wind. Windmills have become the glamorous new symbol of clean energy and, like a stylized atom or rocket ship in the 1950s, of a hopeful future made possible by technological progress. As far as I know they haven't yet shown up in upholstery textiles or restaurant decor (give it time), but images of windmills are everywhere in this season's ads, political and otherwise. Obama has them. McCain has them. Boone Pickens has them. GE has them. An ad promoting Minnesota in the new issue of Fortune has them. Bank of America ATMs have them, promoting paperless online banking. Even Turkish Honda Civic ads have them.

These images epitomize grace, one of the essential components of glamour. The blades appear to turn effortlessly, generating energy without waste. They look as autonomous as a bird in flight. Everyone, including me, leaves out the massive power lines required to carry the electricity some place where it will be useful. These are glamorized images.

Like all glamour, these images create an illusion. The grubby details of wind energy aren't as pristine as the pictures. Generating and transmitting electricity is a complicated business, requiring unglamorous, behind-the-scenes labor and expertise--not to mention huge structures that the neighbors may not like. Even wind-energy promoter Boone Pickens admits that a wind farm isn't self-sufficient as a power source: "You've got to supplement it with a gas-fired or coal-fired source so whoever buys it gets continuous 24-7 generation."

Glamour is a "magic light" that distorts perceptions. Its allure depends on obscuring some details and heightening others. Experience and close examination tend to destroy glamour, often replacing it not with sober realism but something far more negative. Once disillusioned, the once-enchanted audience can become excessively cynical, unwilling to see anything good in what it once idealized. It's dangerous to depend too much on glamour. Just ask the nuclear power industry.

[Click photos to see larger versions.]

Breaking the Spell at Barneys Beverly Hills

This is what happens when you assume that only valets will take the stairs.

"Countless Layers of Darkness"

Leave it to Kate to associate lipstick fads with Japanese literary musings. But it's a great reference. Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows is, in its own subtle (and intensely conservative) way, one of the great books for understanding glamour--in particular, the mystery that glamour requires. Tanizaki also offers an important historical insight into why religious and luxury objects that may seem gaudy today were glamorous and inspiring in the conditions for which they were designed.

Darkness is an indispensable element of the beauty of lacquerware. Nowadays they make even a white lacquer, but the lacquerware of the past was finished in black, brown, or red, colors built up of countless layers of darkness, the inevitable product of the darkness in which life was lived. Sometimes a superb piece of black laquerware, decorated perhaps with flecks of silver and gold—a box or a desk or a set of shelves—will seem to me unsettlingly garish and altogether vulgar. But render pitch black the void in which they stand, and light them not with the rays of the sun or electricity but rather a single lantern or candle: suddenly those garish objects turn somber, refined, dignified. Artisans of old, when they finished their works in lacquer and decorated them in sparkling patterns, must surely have had in mind dark rooms and sought to turn to good effect what feeble light there was. Their extravagant use of gold, too, I should imagine, came of understanding how it gleams forth from out of the darkness and reflects the lamplight.

Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested. The sheen of the lacquer, set out in the night, reflects the wavering candlelight, announcing the drafts that find their way from time to time into the quiet room, luring one into a state of reverie. If the lacquer is taken away, much of the spell disappears from the dream world built by that strange light of candle and lamp, that wavering light beating the pulse of the night. Indeed the thin, implausible, faltering light, picked up as though little rivers were running through the room, collecting little pools here and there, lacquers a pattern on the surface of the night itself.

This insight applies not only to Japanese lacquerware and statuary but to gilded Renaissance and Medieval religious art and the excesses of crown jewels. It even applies to the flash of rhinestone cowboy and rock-star costumes, which are meant to be seen at a distance under stage lights.

Clark Rockefeller vs. the DuPont Twins: Friend or Faux?

The curious case of Clark Rockefeller, aka Christian Gerhartsreiter,  is a  textbook example of evil  impersonation.  He's also the living embodiment of the locker-room motto--"Go big or go home".  If you're going to assume an identity, might as well assume a biggie.  (He's got a certain family resemblance, as the NY Post pointed out.)

A former German exchange student, Clark made a few missteps of style while hanging around old-money Cornish, New Hampshire--ostentatious wheels,  name dropping--but he had a better- than-expected art collection, and that's always useful.  Previously,  he'd resided  in a San Marino, CA guest house  where police are preparing to unleash ground-penetrating radar in hopes of finding traces of his former landlords, who haven't been seen since 1985.  He moved away shortly thereafter.

He's got the opportunistic knack of meeting  the right people. Turning up in Montana,  he adopted a mutt from the local shelter--where  Maggie McGuane, daughter of novelist Thomas McGuane and actress Margot Kidder,  was volunteering.  Where's Fluffy now? 

And long story short,  he's in custody for kidnapping his daughter off a  Boston street.  What a tangled web, etc. 

But not all fakes are so malicious.

Back in the disco era, the DuPont Twins were everywhere they should have been, all the time.  Tall, blond and sweetly 17, they left their catering jobs in Connecticut (working for some woman named Martha) and hit  New York  just in time to meet Andy Warhol.  To be fair, Robert and Richard Lasko only decided on DuPont after getting advice from  Holly Woodlawn, who told them they needed a famous name.  Well, if anyone should know.....

So, they made the scene and just about everyone around ( they did drugs and Andy) and had a lot of fun.  No doubt some naifs took them to be real DuPonts, but they weren't trying to fool anyone.   Any day now, the twins are supposed to be played by Zac Efron.

Radar rounds up other impersonators, but of course, no one can really be sure how many are out there.

Kiss My Black, Black Lips

Cosmetic companies sometimes launch products that seem, at first glance, to work at cross-purposes with their mission. If makeup is intended to make women more alluring, more desirable, and to enhance whatever natural beauty exists, then what the hell is black lipstick supposed to do?

MAC has Cyber, a purplish-blackish-purple. Corpse-sque.

YSL Beaute offers Gloss Pur Black , which looks like patent leather. Good if you want to kiss boots, but hate to bend over.

Lancome has Piha Black, a sheer gloss that looks good on the eyes, too. Black eyes, black heart. 

Historically, blackened teeth, rather than lips, have been considered beautiful. In Southeast Asia, teeth were lacquered as a decay preventative and also as a way of assuring others that you weren't an animal or evil spirit, with long white fangs.

In Japan, teeth were blackened  (ohaguro) with a dye made of iron filings. Teeth Color as a Cultural Form, an essay by Masahiko Fukagawa, explains the history of the practice and philosophy behind it.

Novelist Junichiro Tanizaki   explored traditional Japanese aesthetics In Praise of Shadows, while mourning what he saw as disappearing in the harsh light of Western culture. He wrote of middle class women, living in dark interiors, wearing dark kimono, whose whitened faces contrasted with their blackened teeth.

Does black lip gloss emphasize the gleaming white teeth of the fashionable beauty?

A Design Note

Thanks to our fantastic graphic designer, Julia Ames of Spoolia, for creating our logo and rotating banners. Today's features a photo of silent film star Dorothy Jordan (who came out of retirement to appear in The Searchers), taken by the great George Hurrell. Our thanks to the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive for permission to use the photo. Pancho Barnes was a great friend of Hurrell and, to continue a theme, an early aviatrix who was none too impressed with Amelia Earhart's flying skills.

Fake Restaurant Osteria L'Intrepido Fools Wine Spectator

Charlie Perry, late of the LA Times and reknowned food scholar, alerts us to this fascinating tale of fakery:

Fake restaurant invented by author wins prestigious award

Robin Goldstein, a British wine and food writer, bamboozled The Wine Spectator into giving his made-up bistro, Osteria L'Intrepido di Milano, their Award of Excellence, which recognizes places with impressive wine lists. He created a website, paid the entry fee, and even went so far as to review his creation on Chowhound, a touch Perry found especially admirably inventive (of course, Chowhound deleted them.) We like that the wine director is one Augusto Crazia.

Goldstein claims it's all in the name of academic reseach. Of course, the best part was his creation of a lengthy wine list--featuring vintages that the Spectator had described as "smelling of bug spray" and as having "Just too much paint thinner and nail varnish character."

Wine Spectator was not amused, but seems to miss the point that they gave an award to a place that never existed, which raises the question, "Has this happened before?" In the trade, the WS award is considered to be handed out to anyone with the entrance fee.

Here in Los Angeles, we've got our own fake bistro--Quinoa.

CSS Bleg

We help with CSS code to make our banner's size dynamic--without screwing up the rest of the Typepad defaults.

"The Ultimate Glamorous and Daring Modern Woman"

As I've written before, the aviator is one of the most enduring icons of masculine glamour. Amelia Earhart gave that glamour a feminine face, and feminine grace. She was modern and sexy, but in a ladylike way. Her mysterious disappearance only heightened her glamour.

Last June I was lucky enough to catch this exhibit, "Amelia Earhart: Icon and Image, at the International Center of Photography in New York. Through a host of images, ranging from news photos to Steichen portraits, the exhibit documented how Earhart, her husband, and an enthusiastic press constructed an image of the iconic "Lady Lindy"--a representative of the "new woman" but also of the traditional values of modesty and hard work (as opposed to decadent flappers). This slide show of images offers a small sample of the exhibit. Although Earhart was far from the best of the era's female aviators, she was the most photogenic and image-savvy. And it didn't hurt that she looked remarkably like a feminine version of Charles Lindbergh. ICP's Kristen Lubben writes in the excellent exhibit catalog:

Hilary Swank To Play Thin French Woman

Hilary Swank will take a break from turning herself in to a man, and play a French Champagne executive in a film adaptation of French Women Don't Get Fat, the bestseller written by former Veuve Cliquot executive Mireille Guiliano.

Some wetblanket researchers found that  French women have gained, on average, one dress size since the 1970s and adult obesity in France could equal rates seen in America as soon as 2020. No movie in that!

Swank's been French before, odd as that seems. Starring in The Affair of the Necklace, she played a French aristocrat thrown into turmoil by the Revoltion and with a nod to her career-building transvestism, wore knee britches and a tricorn and looked more elegant than in the vast skirts and lavish jewels.

She's currently filming Amelia, playing aviatrix Amelia Earhart, with Richard Gere as her husband and promotor George Putnam. FOX has been stingy with production stills, but director Mira Nair is letting someone make Swank look suitably Mid-Western and drab.

Which is a pity, as Earhart and Putnam knew the value of image.

Karl Lagerfeld in Pixels and Plush

Karl Lagerfeld branches out from his usual roles as designer, philosopher, and diet book author into a new genre--video games. In Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV, he's a radio host/DJ, on the K109 The Studio radio station, playing electronica and dance music, which was quite a switch for Liberty City citizens.(Take a listen after the jump.) The game will be available for PC in November, but be warned--he's never on-screen.

But wait! There's more.

Steiff, the venerable German toy company, has recently introduced the Karl Lagerfeld bear. Exclusive to Neiman Marcus, the  retails for $1500 and features sunglasses and a KL blinged-out belt buckle. And curse the gods--only 2500 of the lush plushies will be made.

In W, Miles Socha got the gloved one (no,  the other gloved one) to admit:

I never played with anything like toys. I wanted to be grown-up.

So, having achieved hyper-adulthood, Lagerfeld now decided to be immortalized in both pixels and plush?

September Fashion--The Big Books

Vogue

Keira Knightly in Balenciaga pirate togs.

Glossed Over live-blogs the behemoth.   Best line:

Eye makeup looks for fall are "channeling thirties Berlin," says makeup artist Pat McGrath. Indeed! The Weimar Republic did take quite a stand on eyeliner.

Bazaar

Tyra Banks as the biggest cover model ever.  (This is the subscription cover.  Newsstand is here.)

Yes, she's supposed to be Michelle Obama.  Yes, it's weird. Limelife readers agree:

It's totally bizarre and not Bazaar. What was she thinking?

(There's a fashion spread inside that we'll be discussing later, so stay tuned.  And no, it's not the plus-sized Rachel Zoe.)

Maureen Callahan of  the NY Post  labors through all the big books and comes up with ashes and black roses. Tough times ahead.

Lauren Sandler at Slate reviews hemlines, the markets and ad sales at the fashion mags.

And if you're too broke, eco-conscious or cheap to pay full price, you can always  read them at Mygazines.com

Dream House, Dream Car

I'm fascinated by this ad (by Venebles, Bell & Partners), which has been running in heavy rotation during the Olympics. It adopts the conventions of shelter magazines (and their advertisers) in presenting an empty but evocative home interior, then speeds up the imagery so fast that you experience the space only as if out of the corner of your eye. You don't quite have time to feel the glamour of the interior or the displaced meaning it represents. But that's OK, because the ad is using the house to sell a car.

The ad works because you don't need the details. You already know what the house, in its two incarnations, represents: the good life. What's interesting is that the ad doesn't cheat. It makes the traditionalist interior look well-designed and appealing. It simply presents an alternative and names it "progress," confident that the audience it wants will agree. And then, of course, the trick is to get people who feel the allure of the modern house to identify with Audi rather than (again, no cheat) Mercedes.

Keith Barry of Wired.com provides some background on Audi's advertising strategy. For more on displaced meaning, and the equally relevant concept of the Diderot Effect, see Grant McCracken's Culture and Consumption.

You Weren't Supposed to Be Reading This Yet

Thanks to Jesse Walker, The Agitator, and Sean Kinsell, we're getting traffic already. Thanks, guys, but we're just practicing at the moment and the blog's design is only temporary. Monday, August 25 is the official launch! It will be much more glamorous then.

OK, you can read now. (But our graphic designer is still refining the logo.)

Horror or Humor?

Beyond the ordinary factors that give the Democrats an advantage this year, Barack Obama's glamour poses a huge problem for the McCain campaign. To destroy glamour, you have to change perceptions. You can try sober realism. But that lacks emotional punch. To strike at glamour's emotional core, horror and ridicule work better. Instead of telling the audience to ignore its desires and be rational, they replace desire with dread or derision. What was once inspirational becomes terrible or absurd.

McCain's "The One" attack ad (now in a new Denver convention version, above) is clearly an attempt to strip some of the glamour off Obama. That much is indisputable. Pundits are now arguing about whether the ad's imagery is intended as satire (the ridicule strategy) or as a veiled attempt to paint Obama as the Antichrist (the horror strategy). If you're a cool cosmopolitan character, it's hard to object to satire, even when directed at your favorite political figure. Irony is too much a part of your cultural milieu. Hence the appeal of the horror narrative: The ad isn't mocking Obama for messianic excess. It's literally portraying him as not just any old false messiah but the Antichrist.

What's interesting about this dispute is that it can't be resolved simply by looking at the ad. The interpretation is entirely in the audience's mind. The words and imagery that make Obama look ridiculously messianic are the same words and imagery that make him look like he's usurping the real Messiah's role. There's no way an ad meant to spoof him could avoid the charge of playing to fundamentalist fears. Do you find those words and images silly or scary? It depends on your cultural assumptions.

Though I'm not exactly a fan, I find it hard to believe that John McCain, a man whose humor is a major part of his persona and who clearly thinks Obama is a wet-behind-the-ears pretender, intended anything other than satire. The ad seems like obvious mockery. But it's impossible to disprove that someone in the campaign wanted a "dog whistle" to scare fundamentalists. Like glamour, humor is in the audience's mind. And the people who look at the ad and cry, "Antichrist" see only horror in the Republican base, imagining the worst. Hat tip: Megan McArdle

Mid-Century Corporate Glamour

Before visiting the National Building Museum's exhibit, "Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future," which runs through Sunday, August 23, I had thought of Saarinen as the designer of such icons of optimistic, swoopy modernism as the TWA Terminal (pictured here), St. Louis Arch, and tulip chair. I was ignorant, but not unusual.

What's been largely forgotten by the non-expert public is that Saarinen's future-shaping architecture included the design of many corporate research campuses, including those for Bell Labs, IBM, and GM. These facilities were just as forward-looking and glamorous in their day as any airport. "Coming to work at the Tech Center was like stepping into the future," Wayne Cherry, GM's vp for design, told Metropolis magazine in 2003. (Great slideshow here.) In December 1955, Architecture Forum called Saarinen's GM Technical Center "nothing less than the Industrial Versailles--the nerve center, the capitol of an empire whose corporate directors and managers believe in what GM stands for and what it does even more firmly than Louis XIV ever believed he was divine, and have declared themselves (as he did) in the way they built."

Click here, or on the photo above, for examples of Saarinen's work from the National Building Museum exhibit.

This 2004 Boston Globe article heralded Saarinen's return to popularity among architects and scholars.

Why Deep Glamour?

DeepGlamour.net is a spinoff of my research for a book on glamour that I'm writing for The Free Press. It's a way to try out ideas, interview interesting people, and get feedback from readers. It also gives me a chance to apply my ideas about glamour to time-sensitive subjects.

This isn't a one-woman site, however. One of the biggest reasons for starting it was a chance to work with Kate Coe, a woman with impeccable taste and a vast historical knowledge of Hollywood, fashion, and design. We're partners in this enterprise, and we'll be bringing in other writers, both one-time guests and regular contributors. We welcome your ideas and comments.

To kick things off, here's an excerpt from the first chapter of my book-in-progress.