Deep Glamour: At the Intersection of Imagination & Desire

Cate Blanchett's Glamour (and Why I Love This Photo)

Taken at the 2007 Academy Awards, this photo of Cate Blanchett  (which I dug up to illustrate the Fug Girls interview) deconstructs the usual red carpet glamour. It's almost a behind-the-scenes shot. Rather than spotlighting an autonomous star in a "Who Are You Wearing" pose, it includes a jumbled crowd of anonymous faces and partly seen suits. The red carpet itself is hidden and, as if to emphasize the makeshift nature of the de facto outdoor set, a bit of scaffolding is evident on the left. Blue sky peeks through the clouds, emphasizing the bizarre nature of the ritual--stars promenading in evening dress while it's still afternoon, a concession to East Coast schedules. This is the clutter you see on the scene, not the edited version on television or in magazines.

Instead of the usual cropped and constructed scene, the photo provides something more compelling: a glamorous vision of a poised and radiant star. With her smooth pale skin, Blanchett stands out from the dull background as if she were the only truly present and vital person there. She is at once self-contained and responsive to her unseen interviewer, who appears as a still life or synecdoche for "Hollywood reporter:" red nail polish, notebook, and digital recorder. The occasion may not appear glamorous, but Blanchett does. She is at once the center of attention and a mysterious universe of her own. She evokes aspiration. Wouldn't you want to be like that?

Blanchett is not glamorous because she is pretty or dresses well. Glamour is not something you can get from a stylist. It's not about what you wear. It is not taste. These are merely tools. Glamour is an imaginative quality, something you create in an audience's mind, and it requires a certain amount of distance. As reader Randall Shinn aptly notes in a comment on the Heather and Jessica interview, "Cate Blanchett's glamour may partly come from her desire for mystery." He quotes her: "I don’t want behind-the-scenes footage, I don’t want to know about the actor’s personal life. I want to experience their revelation of what it means to be human, to see somebody transporting me to another world."

Blanchett seems to have solved the essential dilemma of 21st-century glamour: how to preserve translucence in a transparent society. In this interesting post Grant McCracken discussed Blanchett's chameleon glamour, citing an assessment from Scott Rudin: "She's very shrewd about what capital she gives up and when.  When she gives you the tiniest bit of insight into why the character's behaving the way she is, you gobble it up.  I think it's a combination of alluring and elusive."

[Photo by Richard Harbaugh, courtesy of Image.net, ©A.M.P.A.S.]

Chicago Jewelbox Apartment--Anointed by Oprah

The Autumn issue of O at Home features an especially delightful  apartment in Chicago.  Bart Swindall, the curator of the Auditorium Theater, opens up his 547  sq. foot mansionette-ette.

His number one rule:

Don't confuse decorating with shopping. 

Heavily influenced by the 1947 House & Garden's Complete Guide to Interior Decoration, Swindall packs a lot, and I mean a lot, of glamour into those rooms.

Interestingly enough, he'd entered his  jewelbox flat in Apartment Therapy's Smallest, Coolest contest, where the MCM enthusiasts failed to appreciate the flat-black walls and dramatic low-wattage lighting.

Swindall's also a freelance decorator, but he's low-key about his talents.  As one of the O team told him

You're not like our typical subject. In fact, we've never done a piece like this before.

You know those shelter mag types--it's all about the merch.

DG got him to spill all his secrets, and was thrilled to learn that he loves Dorothy Draper as much as I do.

Breaking: Paris Hilton Doc. Held to 1 Screen at Toronto Film Fest

Spout's Karina Longworth tumbles the news that Paris, Not France will have only one screening in Toronto.

DG wonders who on earth could sit through it twice?

Did Hilton's legal team cancel the film? Or were the advance sales so poor that her PR handlers moved in to spare her embarrassment? 

As if that were remotely possible.

Glam or Spam? Pucker up

Most of DG's readers voted Spam on the red plush/gilt/OTT bedroom that was our first foray into Glam or Spam territory. Would anyone be surprised to learn that this is a room in the palace of Robert Mugabe, wacko strongman despot of Zimbabwe?

This week's questionable image :

Dali-esque fun? Or does it remind you of Melanie Griffith's wardrobe in Something Wild?  Or should we just zip it?

Geek Glamour, Posthuman Horror: A Musical Meditation

The Future Soon, by Jonathan Coulton, with video by Mike Spiff Booth

Cause it’s gonna be the future soon
And I won’t always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

From Glamour to Horror

In an astute comment on my post on horror versus humor in McCain's "The One" ad, Jens Fiederer writes, "I don't think horror diminishes glamor, horror is a glamor of its own. Watch some vampire films if you doubt that. If this ad is supposed to evoke horror..., it works WITH the glamor to paint a glamorous arch-villain and encourage those convinced to choose sides."

Jens is absolutely right to that glamour and horror often go together. The original meaning of glamour was, after all, a literal magic spell cast to deceive the viewer into seeing things that weren't there. "When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o’er the eyes of the spectator," explained a 1721 glossary of poetry. The word's definition has obviously evolved, but glamour is still an illusion.

He's right, too, to single out vampires as a glamorous archetype. While horror comes in different forms, some decidedly unglamorous (e.g., Alien, Saw), a lot of horror, including vampire tales, depends on glamour: What starts out as beautiful and alluring is revealed to be terrible and life-destroying--and by then it's too late. Witness not only the vampire but the femme fatale, especially in her 19th-century form. Glamour promises escape and transformation; horror replaces escape with entrapment.

Get the Loulou de la Falaise Look For Less

Fashion icon and YSL muse, Loulou de la Falaise usually can be found in Paris, where she has two boutiques offering her jewelery and accessories. She's been everywhere, is related to Gloria Swanson, Keith Richards, and Mark Birley, the founder of Annabel's, and inspired Yves Saint Laurent for over 30 years. Living at the very thinnest air Everest of chic, Loulou and her personal style would seem to be unobtainable to mere mortals.

She's a great deal more accessible than you might think. She's got a line for the Home Shopping Network.

HSN has been offering class for mass for a number of years now, but de la Falaise isn't exactly a household name, unless you live in a very exclusive zip code. Her jewelry is well-designed, if not very exciting, all dangling earrings and her trademark Loup motif. The calf-hair ballet flats and coordinating bag are much more stylish.  (Personally, I'd cover up the gold trim on the shoe heels--inches away from  tacky.)

She was on the call-in show last week, according to WWD

sounding like someone’s fashionable Parisian aunt as she instructed women on how to put looks from her collection together.

If Coco Chanel was alive today, she'd be right there, taking calls from Mitzi in Boca Raton, and you know it.

We Have a Winner!

We have a winner: Congratulations to Melissa Palmer, who was first to identify Frigidaire's Sheer Look appliances as the answer to our contest question. Melissa will receive a copy of Forgotten Fashion signed by Kate Hahn and Andraé Gonzalo. Thanks to all who entered the contest. And don't forget to order your copies of the book from Amazon.

The Sheer Look: Appliance Glamour?

In this strange cultural artifact, a man and woman in evening dress dance to show off Frigidaire's new Sheer Look appliances, introduced in 1957. Two years later, an IIT poll of 100 top design experts put the appliance line on the Top Ten list of "best-designed products of modern times," along with such icons as the Barcelona chair and Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter.

In The American Design Adventure 1940-1975, Arthur J. Pulos explains what made the appliances so new and appealing:

By the late 1950s it was evident that the trend in the design of major appliances was away from the softer shapes of the streamline era and toward sharp rectilinear forms. Where once the use of high-temperature glass enamels had necessitated rounded corners for proper flow and fusion, ow the introduction of thinner insulation made it ossible to use lighter-gauge, prepainted sheet metal, which could be formed into sharp rectangular boxes on new continuous roller machines without stamping and crowning. Moreover, rectangular boxes were in harmony with the International Style of architecture and suitable as "built-ins."

Frigidaire captured the public's attention with an inspired advertising campaign (conceived by the Kudner agency) that promoted the "Sheer Look" of its new appliances. Other companies had taken slow, hesitant steps toward the new look, but Frigidaire boldly redesigned its entire line in the style of the 1956 Kitchen of Tomorrow. No one seemed to regret the elimination of the armorial escutcheons and chrome hardware that had characterized appliance design for a decade. The Kudner agency's advertisements for the new line in magazines and newspapers showed models in Oleg Cassini "Sheer Look" gowns performing the "Sheer Look" gesture with elbow-length gloves. In a further effort to fix the line's association with high style in the public mind, Frigidaire staged a well-publicized fashion show to which other prominent fashion designers were invited to contribute costumes inspired by the "Sheer Look." Thus one word, sheer, was used to identify a line of products with high fashion, and with runway success.

There was, in fact, nothing sheer about the appliances and, remarks Pulos, "the new look was actually generated by technological advances rather than fashion--it was associated with fashion in order to make it more palatable to the public."

The appliances were acclaimed by designers and widely adopted. But were they glamorous? Did they represent something more than a new-and-improved way to keep food cold or wash dishes? Despite the dancing and the ladies in gloves, I find it hard to believe that the Sheer Look creating the kind of yearning essential to the experience of glamour. At best, they represented the idea of being up to date. But then I wasn't alive in 1957, and the historical record is sketchy. Does anyone remember appliance glamour?

We have a winner: Congratulations to Melissa Palmer, who was first to identify Frigidaire's Sheer Look appliances as the answer to our contest question. Melissa will receive a copy of Forgotten Fashion signed by Kate Hahn and Andraé Gonzalo. Thanks to all who entered the contest. And don't forget to order your copies of the book from Amazon.

Glamorous Companies

My brother, a Nike alumnus, remarks that his former company's glamour attracts lots of eager recruits. What other companies are glamorous--and to whom? Our initial list: Apple, Electronic Arts (EA games), Pixar, Google. Glamour requires more than the chance to make money, though that doesn't hurt. Looking at that list, it seems to come from a combination of culturally significant and visibly creative output, the chance to work with interesting, smart people, and cool corporate perks. (Of course, the realities of day-to-day operations, even when basically positive, are never as glamorous as the outside view.)

In another era, or another culture, other considerations dominate. IBM was glamorous. It offered cultural significance and smart colleagues, plus an all-encompassing way of life and a mystery born of corporate secrecy. Then it became the not-so-glamorous bureaucratic Man.

What other companies are glamorous today? What about the past? Other countries? And what leads to corporate glamour?

[Brand brands photo courtesy of Flickr user mleak. Used with permission. All rights reserved.]

DG Q & A: Heather and Jessica

Jessica and Heather, of Go FugYourself, which features celebrities making truly unglamorous fashion choices, kindly agreed to help our weekly Q &A feature make its debut. Besides the DG Dozen and our Either/Or choices, we'll ask each guest bespoke questions, tailored to fit. Let the revels commence.

DG: Does looking at and commenting on images of fashion and Hollywood make you more sensitive to glamour? Or is there a glam-burnout factor?

HEATHER: I don't think so -- like a lot of people, I love pretty things and shiny things, and my camp sensibilities (like the part of me that is deeply enamored of Dynasty and Joan Collins) tend to make me attracted to awesome over-the-top glamour. If anything looking at images of fashion in Hollywood has made me realize that not many people DO old-school glamour any more. Oddly enough, one of the people carrying the torch the most is Sharon Stone, who is clearly nutty, but at least she's out there swinging for the fences. And her crazy fabulousness often pays off, but even so, if you were a starlet, wouldn't you rather go for her brand of wackadoo glam with mattress-sized fur throws than look cheap?

JESSICA: I agree. Nothing makes you long for old-school, proper glamour like seeing starlets schlepping to Starbucks in sweatsuits every day.

DG: If stylists are responsible for dressing so many stars and celebs, are you ever astonished by someone with personal glamour?

HEATHER: It's so hard to tell who truly has personal glamour, except for, again, probably Sharon Stone and her ilk. A good stylist has an invisible hand -- I'm sure there are a lot of starlets with innate taste, but just as many of them who we THINK have innate taste actually have a stylist with a great eye for how to dress that girl's personality and make the clothes look like an extension of herself. So who's to say how much of glamour is natural to that person and how much is applied by a clever stylist? I guess in the sense that I am clearly a cynic, I probably would be surprised to find out whose sense of glamour is theirs and theirs alone, versus applied to them by a smart stylist.

JESSICA: I think almost every celebrity uses a stylist these days, so it really becomes, for me, a question, of who has the personality and the oomph to pull off truly glamourous items. Jennifer Lopez, for example, managed to get away with wearing false mink lashes, which -- no matter what you think of her -- is pretty glam.

The DG Dozen

1) How do you define glamour?

HEATHER: I think it's that rare combination of someone who can wear flashy, luxe, highly stylized clothes without getting lost in them -- someone for whom every outfit is an enhancement of her natural beauty, no matter what that outfit is.

JESSICA: I think that's a good definition. I also think glamour has a lot to do with attitude -- "I'll wear this turban and look amazing in it, darling" -- and supreme self-confidence in your own fabulousness. And  impeccable attention to detail.

2) Who or what is your glamorous icon?

Vogue India's Fashion Spread--Cruel or Just Cliché?

Vogue India resorted to a fashion spread cliché*--real people posed with expensive merch. But, as many real Indians are extremely poor, the NY Times felt called upon to report about  how unseemly this was:

The juxtaposition between poverty and growing wealth presents an unsavory dilemma for luxury goods makers jumping into India: How does one sell something like a $1,000 handbag in a country where most people will never amass that sum of money in their lives, and many are starving?

On the other hand, is a country, city, state, region to be defined only by those things or issues that the NY Times deems suitable? Kanika Gahlaut, a columnist at the Mail Today, was appalled by the insensitivity of the photos, but the EIC, Priya Tanna, suggested that everyone "lighten up". India's luxury market is growing fast, and purveyors of such goods are always looking for new customers.

And as India's poor co-existed for centuries with some of the most conspicuous consumers the world has ever known,  it seems a little late to suddenly notice that "Ohmigod--there's begging in the streets outside Louis Vuitton!"

If Burberry was distressed by British chavs sporting their trademark plaid,  how will they react to the $200 umbrella in the photo?

Burberry opens in Delhi

* Remember the Diana Ross vehicle, Mahogany?
**ANTM not only posed the contestants with the homeless, they found a new wannabe in the extras.