Frat boys are customarily considered the scourge of the earth, at least in all right-thinking online circles. On the other hand, 16 members of the Sigma Phi chapter at UC Berkeley live in one of the state's architectural treasures, the Greene and Greene- designed Thorsen House. Tracey Taylor, writing for the Financial Times, investigated, and found that not only were these brothers residents, they're also the caretakers.
Gamble House, in Pasadena, is perhaps better known, but no one is in residence.
Paramount recently released the poster for the new Star Trek movie, opening May 8. The black and white composition and almost abstract suggestion of speed make an interesting contrast to the clear forms and primary colors of the original show.
Long-time DG readers may remember this quotation, comparing James Bond and Mr. Spock, from Jeff Greenwald's 1999 book Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth. Like Ayn Rand's novels, Star Trek traffics in glamour that appeals to people who generally think they're immune to such frivolous nonsense (and, conversely, whose obsessions seem decidedly unglamorous to most of the fashion crowd). Greenwald's book has a number of good passages that deal with Star Trek's glamour, without using the word. Here's one of the best, which follows his girlfriend's insight that the book "is about longing," the subject of all glamour:
When I began this book, I naively imagined that everyone I spoke to would echo my own intuition: that Star Trek has become successful because it awakens a collective human yearning to get out into space and explore the “final frontier” in earnest. A number of people on my list did indeed feel this way—but they were in the minority. Star Trek, I learned, inspires longings of many kinds. It’s a mirror that people tune like a radio, focusing on the aspects that attract them most.
Star Trek invokes an almost primal wanderlust—a hardwired compulsion to break away from the familiar, and plumb the depths of outer and inner space. It inspires a desire to build a society where technology is partnered with conscience. It evokes a yearning for family and friendship, which is played out in a thousand different fan clubs and Web sites around the world. And it fulfills a deep and eternal need for something to believe in: something vast and powerful, yet rational and contemporary. Something that makes sense.
One of the trailers for the new Star Trek movie features someone’s voice telling young Jim Kirk, “You’ve always had a hard time finding a place in this world, haven’t you? Never knowing your true worth. You can settle for something less, an ordinary life. Or do you feel like you were meant for something better? Something special.” In the trailer, that enticing suggestion accompanies this evocative shot, which beautifully captures both the centrality of the individual and the longing to belong to something larger than oneself:
The promise of becoming someone special is at the heart of much glamour, from the allure of beautiful dresses to the appeal of the U.S. Marine Corps. Particularly for people who feel out of place in their surrounding community, the idea of belonging to an ideal fellowship (Camelot's Round Table, Ayn Rand's Galt's Gulch, the Enterprise crew) is particularly powerful—and, as Greenwald documents, able to sustain real-world fellowship among devotees who share the same enthusiasm.
"Glamorizing" usually implies an active effort at editing out flaws: retouchingphotos, showing cigarettes without smoke smell or cancer, celebrating cliquish bullies as Queen Bees and Gossip Girls. But, as these two contrasting passages from classic works illustrate, glamour can also arise from the audience's willingness or proclivity simply to overlook flaws.
"Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments," he said; "that house is a mere dungeon: don't you feel it so?"
"It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir."
"The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes," he answered; "and you see it through a charmed medium: you cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs; that the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly bark. Now HERE" (he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) "all is real, sweet, and pure.
No words of mine can tell you how Wendy despised those pirates. To the boys there was at least some glamour in the pirate calling; but all that she saw was that the ship had not been tidied for years. There was not a porthole on the grimy glass of which you might not have written with your finger "Dirty pig"; and she had already written it on several.
As anyone who has ever framed a photographic shot only to notice dirt on the window or wires across the view knows, the mind always does some unconscious editing. (Those of us in love with Florence rarely notice theubiquitousgraffiti.) But I think there's a deeper truth here that applies equally to overt glamorization: Glamour only works on the receptive imagination.
Some peopleare--tosaytheleast--as immune to Barack Obama's glamour as Wendy was to that of the pirate calling. Even the "world's most glamorous couple" gets mixed reviews. “I fail to see the glamour of this couple,” writes a website commenter about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. “They usually look like aged hobos.” Although Princess Diana remains a touchstone of late 20th-century glamour, there are plenty of skeptics. A “glamorous” person, setting, or style will not produce glamour unless that object resonates with the audience’s aspirations, and unless the audience is willing to entertain the illusion.
[Paris photo courtesy of Flickr user smallish fish, copyright and used with permission.]
While was wasting time this morning (I mean, “getting smarter reading the internet”), I came across this brief article and slideshow on Julius Shulman, the 98-year old architectural photographer famous for his iconic photos of mid-century L.A. homes. His photo of Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #22 (at left), an impossibly futuristic home perched over glittering Los Angeles at night, represents my absolute ideal of glamour. I’m viscerally drawn to the modern home, the breathtaking view, and the people inside, just beginning a night (and decade) full of potential for fun and drama.
I’m not the only one to look at this image and see “glamour” defined, but it’s not everybody’s glamorous ideal. So why mine? How did I develop an affinity for that kind of image vs. something else? When?
While I’m not so sure about the “how,” I do have an idea about the “when” and also the “where”: Orlando, Florida, 1981. My first trip to Disney World or, more specifically, my first trip to Tomorrowland.
At first glance, Disney World isn’t terribly glamorous. It’s full of tired, sweaty parents and their whiny kids, nothing’s even a little bit authentic, and it’s more heavily merchandised than The Mall of America. But just as Disney teaches kids about manners and social mores, Mickey and friends play a critical role in helping America’s youth develop their attitudes toward glamour.
For me, it was Tomorrowland and its streamlined futuristic aesthetic that took hold. But it could’ve just as easily been Cinderella’s castle that resonated, as it does for thousands of little girls. Or the bordellos-and-brawn-lite version of the Old West that is Frontierland.
So now I’m all grown up and Shulman’s photos have replaced Space Mountain (mostly) when I think “glamour.” What about you? Do you have a glamorous ideal or icon? Can you trace it back to what you loved when you were a kid?
[Space Mountain photo courtesy of Flickr user russes.]
The gods of singing are capricious. Some of us are given passable voices, others pathetic voices. Some are given good voices, and a few are given extraordinary voices. Some of these few have the power to enchant.
Most of the singing we hear today uses electronic amplification. Some singers have learned to take advantage of this, and sometimes use their voices in ways that seem remarkably intimate.
Here’s a video of Alison Krauss using her beautiful voice in this way while performing on a TV show. At times she seems to sing so softly we almost feel we are overhearing her sing to herself. The male members of the group sometimes join her by singing softly into their microphones, gently supporting her. Everything about the group’s performance, including the clothing, suggests casualness, as if they look and sound much the same as they would if we happened to find them singing in someone’s home. (Nonetheless, I find Krauss’ lovely voice and quiet beauty enchanting.)
In contrast to this feeling of intimacy, operas are performed in large theaters, and the singers perform without amplification. Voices large enough to full such spaces are rare, typically need years of training, and can be damaged by singing roles unsuited to their voice and experience. Such rigorously trained voices help opera singers portray larger-than-life characters, and the quality of the voice is integral to those characterizations. Words such as powerful, vibrant, agile, and flexible are sometimes used to describe them--terms we associate with health and vigor. In a confined rehearsal space I once heard two baritones rehearse powerful, macho-tinged arias. A soprano then joked she needed to leave the room because there was too much testosterone in the air.
Given the gods’ capricious nature, large, beautiful voices doesn’t always in up in a bodies as appealing to the eye as the voices are to the ear. Opera fans have often overlooked this issue, but in our media-minded age, appearance has become more of a factor.
Listen to gorgeous, sumptuously voiced Anna Nebretko sing an aria from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi for a TV audience. In this aria the singer tells her father that if he doesn’t help her marry the man she loves, she will jump off the Ponte Vecchio into the Arno River. In singing it she sounds as if she is pleading her case to the whole world—she is singing as she would (without amplification) to move a patron sitting in the last row of a theater.
Since this performance was not in a theater, a microphone was placed on the floor in front of her, and the reverberation was set to emulate the sound of a large hall. The microphone was placed far enough away to allow her to fully use her powerful voice. By contrast, with Alison Krauss the microphone almost touches her lips, allowing her to use a more intimate tone to full effect.
Unlike Krauss, nothing about Nebretko’s performance appears casual. The gown, the makeup, the hair, and the voice all seem larger than life. (Such gowns can cost thousands of dollars, and I find it hard to imagine a more glamorous effect.) The images that we take away from these performances are remarkably different, as they were intended to be. Whatever she is like offstage, in her performance Krauss seems like someone who might, if you met her, talk with you in a relaxed way. In contrast, Nebretko seems like someone who might, if you were lucky, grant you an audience. Krauss seems down-to-earth and approachable; Nebretko seems otherworldly and unreachable.
Their voices and performance personas are each perfectly tuned to
resonate in their chosen performance environments. And while each are
alluring within their domains, each would find her ability to enchant
vastly diminished if forced to trade realms. Lucky us, to have both.
Creating a memorable performance persona is not without danger. A person's public persona and private character are not necessarily the same, and for some people performance images can become traps. In interviews Joan Baez has discussed falling prey to her own mythology when she was young. Although her interest in folk singing and politics remained steadfast, as she grew older she became interested in high-quality clothing. As the photos at her website reveal, she matured into an elegant woman with a sophisticated fashion sense. In 2008 New Zealand fashion designer Annah Stretton named a dress and jacket for her. At the 2007 Grammys, when asked about young performers, Baezrevealed that now she listens to opera. She has refused to let her early image as a performer define or limit her later appearance or cultural interests.
Some opera singers, expected to be glamorous, may in private prefer comfortable casual clothes and be wonderfully down-to-earth. When they need to present a glamorous image, they costume accordingly. There is exceptional danger in falling prey to the mythology that can surround a diva. Seeing oneself constantly in this mythic light can lead to insufferable behavior. At the peak of her fame, silvery-voiced Kathleen Battle became so unapproachable that she had trouble dealing with both her colleagues and the people providing services for her. Her behavior ultimately became so intolerable that in 1994 she was famously fired by the Metropolitan Opera and has not worked in opera since. Here she is performing the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria with guitarist Christopher Parkening.
An enchantress had become entranced by her image as a performer. As her behavior became increasing governed by delusions of grandeur, she forgot that glamour is always partly an illusion. Her performing colleagues did not forget. When told that she had been fired, they applauded. Given how disruptive her behavior had become, one can hardly blame them. Her voice and beauty were otherworldly, but the world of opera, like all live theater, is here-and-now, and thus requires performers who can come down to earth.
(For examples of Netrebko at work in the theater, look at these excerpts (1 and 2) from a Salzburg Festival production of Verdi’s La Traviata,
as broadcast on German television. With such an over-sized stage, intense vocal presence becomes a necessity.)
I can't decide which is less likely: that hip-hop fans are raging racists, or that they're really this ignorant. Being an optimist, I usually go with "ignorant."
It's easier than ever to share DG posts via email, Facebook, Twitter, or just about any other social network you can think of--including the oh-so-addictive StumbleUpon. (If you haven't tried StumbleUpon, check it out.) Just click the little green Share This icon at the bottom of the post.
This British World War I poster, currently up for auction, repesents a calculated attempt to reinforce one of glamour's most ancient forms: martial glamour.
Though not himself a veteran, Frank Dadd, the illustrator, was from the generation portrayed by the old veteran in red. In a busy career, he painted many military scenes, whose accuracy was informed by his collection of arms and armor, but getting the clothes and equipment right isn't the same as portraying what a battle really looks like. (Not all Dadd's war pictures were so glamorous.)
The horrors of the Great War largely destroyed military glamour in Britain. The Dadd family suffered along with the rest of the nation. Three of Frank Dadd's nephews were killed in the war, and another wounded. Dadd's own son survived physically but never recovered from shell shock.
As this earlier post suggests, the ideal of blonde beauty wasn't invented in Hollywood. Good luck finding a brunette Virgin Mary or Venus in a Quattrocentro painting. (Mary Magdalene generally has red hair.) But until yesterday, I didn't know that the blond ideal extended to Donatello's David.
The bronze statue was recently restored and stands in the foreground of the photo to the right. The restoration process identified where the statue originally included gilding. In the museum, if you look very closely you can, in a few places, detect tiny traces of the original gilding. (What you see in the photo is reflected light.) The statue in the back is an exact copy of the original, with the gilding restored.
Here's a closer picture of those shiny gold locks.
The two versions of the statue raise an interesting question about authenticity and copies. Nowadays, it's possible to make a perfect copy of a statue in bronze. So which is the more authentic version of the original? The one that looks the way Donatello intended the statue to look, or the one he actually worked on? As a matter of both modern taste (that gold is a bit much, at least under electric lights) and history, I prefer the original. But I also like seeing them together.
I doubt that anyone feels glamorous all the time. Effort is required to bathe, apply makeup or shave (if one does either), handle your hair, and dress in glamorous clothes. Reality-TV shows about aspiring models make it clear that would-be models can look fairly ordinary when just hanging around, and quite extraordinary when they have been prepared for a photo shoot by various designers and then photographed by a professional photographer with assistants helping with lighting (lighting is crucial).
Models are, to some degree, like living mannequins—sculptural canvases that designers can transform with make-up, hair styling, wigs, artificial lashes and nails, and different clothes and shoes. Clothing designers prefer that the models have slender bodies to hang clothes on, and the camera likes symmetrical faces with good underlying bone structure. And models have to be able to role-play. If the photographer wants them to look happy, sad, or peeved, they need to be able to project that quality.
For the ordinary person, glamour may also require playing a role. We are used to seeing ourselves in some roles—such as daughters, mothers, husbands, and people who do certain kinds of work. But we may not be used to seeing ourselves as a glamorous woman or man, because most of the time that is not the role we play in life. But there are occasions and venues that could allow us to play those roles, if we can manage to allow ourselves do it.
Some women and men that I know enjoy the opportunity to dress up and go out looking more glamorous than usual, while others are quite uncomfortable at the prospect of having to dress up for a special occasion, and will dress up as little as is socially acceptable. Perhaps the latter have a difficult time thinking of themselves in the role of glamorous man or woman going out for the evening. This might be easier if thought of as a temporary role.
An event that gives us the chance to dress up may only last a few hours, and some may find it hard to justify spending money in that way. (And to make an extra effort will likely involve spending some extra time and money, and has to be done within what each person can afford.) But the essential requirement is not spending a lot of money, but rather granting ourselves permission to look out-of-the-ordinary relative to our everyday activities, to be seen as having dolled up for an occasion--to play, for a limited span of time, the role of a more glamorous person. And, if we choose to play that role, why not enjoy ourselves and do it with a touch of panache?
[Photo courtesy of Giorgia Cifani. In the photo, she is dressed to attend the SAG Awards.]
In the 20th century, photographers like Margaret Burke-White and Charles Sheeler portrayed industrial plants with remarkable glamour. Nowadays, we're less excited by the products of industry and more likely to focus on negative environmental effects. As a result, we tend to think of such places as eyesores. As these photos contributed to the DeepGlamour pool by Flickr user beef.200% demonstrate, however, portraits of contemporary industry can also be glamorous. Instead of the crisp black-and-white geometries of earlier photographers, here the trick is building an enticing sense of mystery with the plants' high-intensity lights and the night-time mist. (I'm guessing these are refineries or chemical plants, but I don't know for sure. Check out the rest of the photos in the set here.)
Twice in my life I have been invited into homes that contained no objects designed to provide visual pleasure. No artwork, no family heirlooms, no knickknacks, plain furniture, and plain food served on the plainest plates imaginable. In both cases the husbands were tenured university professors, so poverty was not the cause. One family was Quaker, but lacked the love of beautifully made, simply-designed furniture that many Quakers have. The other family was Jewish and had escaped Europe during World War II. Despite the husband’s success in America, their outlook on life remained as bleak as their home.
In both cases I went home needing to look at some of the visual “treasures” my wife and I have collected for our home. Their cost, whatever that was, is not what makes them treasures to us--what makes them valuable is the pleasure we have in using and looking at them.
The mug shown in the photo is a contemporary version of one designed by architect Mary Colter (1869-1958) for the Santa Fe railroad as part of her Super Chief china. The quail motif is a stylized version of one found on ancient pottery from the Mimbres culture , long vanished from the American Southwest. Coulter was one of the first women architects, and she designed several important buildings for Fred Harvey and the National Park Service. Her buildings remain stylish even today.
I love having morning tea in this mug. It’s beautifully shaped, sturdy, and feels good both in your hand and on your lips. Like most of the objects any of us collect, this one brings back memories and associations, including where we were when we purchased it.
Unfortunately, with familiarity we often take for granted the beauty and pleasure that our collected objects provide us on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s good to remember, to stop and look at them. In an important sense, they help define who we are. I had taken a seminar with one of the professors mentioned above, and I learned more about him as a person in one quick glance around his living room than I had in a whole semester of discussions.
Perhaps the most glamorous couple I have seen during the day was on a vaporetto (motorized bus-boat) in Venice. She was a young Italian beauty whose graceful long neck reminded me of a young Audrey Hepburn. Her dress was exquisite, perfect for a fancy holiday. Her partner was tall, dark, and ridiculously handsome, and he wore a beautiful Italian suit, his jacket draped casually over his shoulders.
It was late Friday afternoon, sunny, and the temperature was exquisite. The vaporetto was leaving from the train station, and from her excited look I assumed they were there for a weekend vacation. The setting was extraordinary, and every once in a while she would stretch up and kiss him on the neck or cheek. The only flaw in this romantic image was that he was talking business on his cell phone the whole ride.
He was not there in the moment. My wife observed, "He's wrecking this for her. He doesn't deserve her." Cell phones are marvelous, but I wonder how many potentially romantic moments they ruin.
In John Fowles novel Daniel Martin
one chapter takes place at an amazing mesa in New Mexico named Tsankawi. When you hike to the mesa top there, you walk on the same trails the Anasazi (Ancient Ones) used centuries ago. The trails are worn into soft volcanic tuff, and in places the trails are worn so deep that you have no choice but to place your feet exactly where they did. I’ve hiked those trails, and doing so created an extraordinary feeling. The surrounding views are magnificent.
When you reach the mesa top, not much remains of the Anasazi village. But you can find shards of their pottery lying on the ground (it’s a Federal crime to remove them). In the novel Daniel takes his girlfriend Jenny there because he wants to share what to him is a magical place. When they reach the mesa top, she is fascinated by the shards, and begins to collect them to make necklaces as presents for her friends. Not only does she miss the magical aura he feels, but she is desecrating it. She says the shards she’s collecting will never be missed. After that Daniel stops seeing her, and she, knowing the reason, tells him that it wasn’t fair for him to take her there as a test.
Was it a fair test or not? Not everyone will share all our personal enthusiasms. If we take someone we care about to a place we find magical, is it a fair test to take their indifference to that enchantment as a sign--an indication that they are not as much our hoped-for soul mate as we had imagined them to be?
[Vaporetta photo courtesy of Flickr user Nick Bramhall, Tsankawi photo courtesy of Flickr user KinnicChick, both under Creative Commons licenses.]
Not surprisingly, a city whose ancient streets include one dedicated to Beautiful Women takes the art of beauty seriously--and not just in the gorgeous faces depicted by Botticelli, Leonardo, and the Lippis.
The Salvatore Ferragamo shoe museum confirms Andy Warhol's observation that department stores and museums are much the same. It also demonstrates, in the contrast between its historic archives and the current exhibit of shoes from the movie Australia, that the chunky styles of the 1940s look better in larger sizes. (There's another YouTube feature, with background on the museum, here.)
My favorite discovery, however, is the tiny Museo della Ciprie, or Museum of Powder Boxes, really just a special room in a perfume shop on the tony Via de' Tornabuoni, not far from Ferragamo. The museum houses a collection of the decorative boxes in which face powder was sold through the first half of the 20th century. How do you package the promise of beauty? Here's a slideshow of examples.
A French favorite since 1946, theSothys line is characterized by essential oils and natural active ingredients. This luxury skincare can be enjoyed at home as well as in the Sothys Institutes in Paris and New York.
Thanks to Katherine at KMR Communications, DG is giving away:
Delicious Scrub: A sensuous texture, with spices, ginger, nutmeg, orange and mandarin essential oils, which soften and delicately perfume the skin.
Energizing Shower Gel: With eucalyptus, cardamom, nutmeg, and neroli essential oils for radiant and tonic skin.
Please be the first reader to email me at kate AT deepglamour DOT net with name and address and the correct answer to this question:
I saw this ad on Italian television, in a restaurant without the sound, and was struck by its weird glamour. Judging from the YouTube comments, some Italians worry that it's reinforcing stereotypes, but I think it acknowledges traditional imagery in an exuberant and contemporary style. It's like a fashion spread in motion. What do you think?
Personal glamour, especially in the sense of magic, makes little sense unless it is audience-aware, even if the audience is oneself. A woman might dress up to assure herself that she is attractive (a man might do the same), or put on nice clothes to brighten her mood. The notion of personal glamour suggests a person who is somewhat aware that he or she is seen as attractive and is (to some degree) comfortable with that.
One of most celebrated epiphanies in literature occurs in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the novel Stephen Dedalus searches for his calling, and vacillates between the priesthood and a career as a artist. He struggles with this intellectually, until, walking on the beach, he encounters mortal beauty and is overwhelmed.
A girl stood before him in midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight; slight and soft as the breast of some dark plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish; and girlish and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
—Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him. Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!
The young girl’s reactions are crucial to Stephen’s experience. She has hiked up her skirts to stand barefoot in the stream, and then, sensing she has an audience, she turns her head. Stephan's ecstatic experience could never have happened if she had quickly turned away in embarrassment. Or if, unnerved by his enraptured gaze, she had begun to back away from him. Instead she looks at him and holds his gaze, tolerating him as he, awestruck, continues to absorb her mortal beauty.
Given her poise, surely this young girl has experienced worshipful gazes before. Perhaps her slender legs have been shaped by Irish folk dancing, and she is confident about her body and used to having an audience. Still, could she ever have imagined that at some unexpected moment, unplanned and transient, she would turn to find a young man gazing at her as if she were a young goddess risen from the sea?
Yet graciously she meets his gaze, captivates him, and then, by turning away, releases him. Surely, when she looks back to see him striding off in ecstatic joy, “singing wildly to the sea,” she knows her appearance has played its part in bewitching this strange young man. I suspect she smiles a little.
She has become, if she was not before, audience-aware. When she looks into her mirror that evening, she may see some reflection of the wonder she saw in that young man’s eyes.
With this post, Randall Shinn joins the DG team. After long enjoying the benefits of his insightful emails, I'm delighted to have a chance to share some of his ideas with DG readers.--VP
How do glamorous people develop the capacity to "suffer the gaze” (a phrase used by James Joyce). In the abstract it may sound exciting to have people stare at you because your appearance seems beyond the norm, but what would that feel like in real life?
In the film Pushing Tin Angelina Jolie arrives at a gathering of air traffic controllers and their wives, and her appearance is so darkly seductive that the other wives distrustfully fixate on her. In real life, how many women could handle that?
While attending an art opening in Phoenix I saw an attractive young woman enter whose high-fashion dress successfully revealed most of her runway-ready figure. The short skirt flared like a tutu, showing off long legs accentuated by high heels. The bib-like top of her dress performed flawlessly. Tied at the neck it revealed her back, the sides of her torso, and sometimes even the sides of her breasts. But it steadfastly refused to reveal more, thus maintaining a hint of decorum and leaving something to the imagination.
Sooner or later she attracted the gaze of every single person in the warehouse-sized gallery. She remained absolutely poised and seemed completely comfortable. Regardless of what other women thought of her dress, I doubt any of them could have worn it so nonchalantly.
People such as actors and models are expected to “suffer the gaze” of others. Do they gradually become comfortable doing this? How important is training? Do some simply act “as if” they feel comfortable? Have others been comfortable drawing attention from an early age?
I learned something about the last possibility from a conversation I had with a woman whom I’ll call Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the hunt. Artemis is an exceptionally self-confident woman and remarkably striking in appearance. She’s tall, lean-muscled, with strong, angular cheekbones, pale amber eyes, and a wild mane of strawberry-blonde hair. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned that I was writing about “suffering the gaze,” she responded, “Some women have the confidence inside to do that.”
I realized she was talking about herself, so I asked her when she had first felt that way, and, thinking back, she said somewhere between the age of eight and ten. From that age on she had had a feeling she described as “a fire inside,” a competitive confidence that caused her to accept any task given to her and say, “I’ll handle it,” even if she knew nothing about how to do it. From that same age she also realized that people liked looking at her, partly because of her striking appearance, and partly because she projected that inner fire.
As she grew into a young woman she learned to signal, as she described it, that “it’s fine to look, but beware of getting too close, you might get burned.” By her twenties she was radiantly happy, which only increased the attention she might attract simply walking down the street, and this sometimes became a nuisance. She also found that some people could mistake her passion for life as a passion for them, so gradually she had to work harder to maintain her personal boundaries.
Some of the circumstances of her childhood were the stuff of nightmares. She had a pathologically self-absorbed mother and a older sister who was confined to a separate part of the house, especially after she almost succeeded in murdering her younger siblings, one by poison and the other by blunt force. Fortunately, her grandfather taught Artemis to hunt and fish, which helped her grow into a tigress who has belly-crawled through prairie grass and cactus to drop a buffalo with a big-game rifle (I saw a photograph), and all with beautifully manicured nails.
She said it’s easy to be self-confident when you don’t care what others think about you. Once she realized that as a young girl, she decided to live her life that way. She said that at any given time there are only a handful of people whose opinions matter to her.
Few of us, I think, could be so fiercely independent from such a early age, perhaps if ever. I suspect most of us would have (or have had) some inner barriers to overcome before, in real life, we could feel comfortable suffering the gaze of a multitude of strangers.
Close up, the Irish, and Irish-Americans, are a pretty hardscrabble lot: famines, economic troubles, alcoholism, a whole lot of sunburns (for those of us in the U.S., anyway). But a glimmer of something fabulous lurks beneath the surface of freckles and greenery. After all, Ireland is well-known for its beauty and its mystery – a pretty glamorous combination.
It might be difficult to spot anything glamorous at your local St. Patrick’s Day parade, where it’s hidden among a whole lot of Guinness-waving frat boys in “I’m Irish Today” t-shirts. But it’s probably there anyway, in the little old man walking with the Hibernians, or the ancient lady in a green blazer and comfortable shoes.
They might not look like movie stars, but these characters are pretty glamorous anyway. They embody the Romantic ideal of the “Noble Savage” – good, simple individuals at the mercy of civilization. Unfettered by societal pressures and norms, their innate goodness would help them live ideal lives, but as a part of civilization, life is difficult and imperfect.
Add to that all the mythology that surrounds Irish life – the magic, the fairies, the leprechauns – and you’ve got some glamour. Even if it is buried underneath a messy pile of frizzy red hair and a big, bulky sweater.
Inspired by Nicole Kidman in period costumes and contemporary clothes, Raquel Laneri at The Southwing considers at length the relative tyrannies of corsets versus hardbodies, writing, "The modern woman who diets and the woman who puts on a corset both chase an ideal, and suffer considerably for that ideal."
Her post reminded me of an astute passage from Neal Stephenson'sThe Diamond Age. The novel is set in a near-future whose many clans include neo-Victorians, who've adapted historical customs and aesthetics to a cultural fragmented world shaped by nanotechnology. (The references to "genuine" materials mean they weren't produced by nanotech replicating machines.)
...he glanced through to door to Gwendolyn's closet and out the other side into her boudoir. Against that room's far windows was the desk she used for social correspondence, really just a table with a top of genuine marble, strewn with bits of stationery, her own and others', dimly identifiable even at this distance as business cards, visiting cards, note cards, invitations from various people still going through triage. Most of the boudoir floor was covered with a tatty carpet, worn through in places all the way down to its underlying matrix of jute, but handwoven and sculpted by genuine Chinese slave labor during the Mao Dynasty. Its only real function was to protect the floor from Gwendolyn's exercise equipment, which gleamed in the dim light scattering off the clouds from Shanghai: a step unit done up in Beaux-Arts ironmongery, a rowing machine cleverly fashioned of writhing sea serpents and hard bodied nereids, a rack of free weights supported by four cillipygious caryatids -- not chunky Greeks but modern women, one of each major racial group, each tricep, gluteus, latissimus, sartorius and rectus abdominus casting its own highlight. Classical architecture indeed.
The caryatids were supposed to be role models, and despite subtle racial differences, each body fit the current ideal: twenty-two-inch waist, no more than 17% body fat. That kind of body couldn't be faked with undergarments, never mind what the ads in the women's magazines claimed; the long, tight bodices of the current mode, and modern fabrics thinner than soap bubbles, made everything obvious. Most women who didn't have superhuman willpower couldn't manage it without the help of a lady's maid who would run them through two or even three vigorous workouts a day.
So after Fiona had stopped breast-feeding, and the time had loomed when Gwen would have to knacker her maternity clothes, they had hired Tiffany Sue--just another of the child-related expenses Hackworth had never imagined until the bills had started to come in. Gwen accused him, half seriously of having eyes for Tiffany Sue. The accusation was almost a standard formality of modern marriage, as lady's maids were all young, pretty, and flawlessly buff. But Tiffany Sue was a typical thete, loud and classless and heavily made up, and Hackworth couldn't abide her. If he had eyes for anyone, it was those caryatids holding up the weight rack; at least they had impeccable taste going for them.
Glamour conceals the effort, making the resulting body seem natural when it is, in fact, a carefully crafted artifact.
Photo is from the Museum at FIT's Seduction exhibit, reviewed (with a slide show) here.
I often say that I wasted my youth learning French. What I usually mean is that I should have studied Spanish, a language I could use nearly every day in my Southern California life. But, given the opportunity to learn another language, Spanish isn't the one I chose.
I'm in Florence, spending the next month taking Italian four hours a day. It's a post-cancer adventure, and a retreat in hopes of getting a bunch of book writing done.
The contrast between my youthful devotion to French and my current interest in Italian (an interest that actually dates to my college studies of the Renaissance) tracks with a shift in U.S. culture. Sometime during my adult life, Paris stopped being Americans' ideal of glamour and was replaced by Tuscany. Look at all these Tuscan makeovers on HGTV, 476 to be exact, (here's the Parisian competition, only 29), or these 56 features on French style, compared to 100 on Mediterranean style, mostly Tuscan. Paris still has its fans, of course, but when the typical middle-class American envisions the perfect escape, Tuscany, not Paris, comes to mind.
Hence, before I left, everyone asked me the same question, Have you read Eat, Pray, Love?
Glamour supplies something people feel is missing in their regular lives. In the era when Paris was the epitome of glamour, Americans were longing for cosmopolitanism and style. Now America is arguably more cosmopolitan than Paris--certainly Los Angeles is--and la mode is as easily found in Italy (or rising from U.S. streets.) as in Paris. What is glamorous today is a life of enjoyment and simplicity: good, fresh food in a beautiful place. Tuscany.
Of course, as anyone who has read Under the Tuscan Sun knows, the ideal of Tuscany as the good, simple life leaves out a few things--notably the way things have a tendency to break down and the difficulty of getting those things repaired efficiently. Glamour always omits the blemishes.
I'm not, in fact, attracted to the good, simple, rural life. Preferisco la città. (I prefer the city.) My glamorous Firenze is the one that drove the Futurists crazy--the museum Florence of past greatness, not present life, a Tuscany of striving and strife. I haven't read Eat, Pray, Love. I've read Macchiavelli, Castiglione, Galileo, Vasari, and Petrarch. I'm here for the art and the history. But the food is definitely a plus.
With this post, we're delighted to add Kit Pollard to the regular DG team.--VP
A couple of years ago, my husband and I began a gigantic home addition/renovation project that included a new, expanded kitchen. I love to cook, but when we sat down with our architect to talk about what was important in the kitchen design, I was all about good party space. Counter space? Whatever. I just wanted shiny appliances and a really long island where everybody could set their drinks when the dancing started.
Apparently I’m not the only one. Super-glam New York decorator Miles Redd admits that his old kitchen (he’s since redecorated), and its 1930s Hollywood glamour-puss vibe, is all about the party and, of course, the cocktails (more pictures here and photos of the new space here). It’s a gorgeous room – all black and white and stainless steel – and the appliances are top-of-the-line. I'm not sure how much action his oven sees, though. The room's careful, fancy clutter and super-shiny surfaces are really more conducive to popping champagne corks than to peeling potatoes.
Unfortunately, at my house, I had to be at least a little bit practical. No lamps or liquor on the countertops for me, and a lot more focus on storage and functional work area. Vintage Venetian crystal lamps are pretty, and I’m sure the quality of the lighting is fabulous for parties, but when your counters are covered with light fixtures and vases and bar trays, where do you chop the vegetables?
Glamour's photo spread of today's fresh young talents impersonating the dead, the old and the fictional female icons women could not be more inadvertently hilarious. It's so bad, it could be an ANTM photo shoot, and you know how silly those are. (Last night, Tyra had the hamsters dressing up as good little girls, which was just as icky as it sounds.) The copy claims:
You can do anything! That’s the message of the
seven decades of female risk takers, rule breakers and style makers
here. We celebrate them with the help of some very-2009 young talents.
It's a toss-up as to which impersonation is the worst. As Rosie the Riveter, Alexis Bedel just looks peevish as she displays her lack of upper body strength. While I'm not so naive as to believe that she actually thought up the accompanying quote, at least it sounds semi- convincing.
But the Women of Woodstock is equally inane. Hippies and their "we can do anything" spirit? Obviously, no one at Glamour was alive then.
DG:Many reviews of Naked Airport invoked the "vanished glamour" of air travel. What destroyed that glamour, and how was the loss reflected in the design of airports?
AG: Several reasons that the glamour went out of air travel: a more competitive airline business with new companies offering lower prices. I flew with my parents to Europe numerous times in the 1960s and we always dressed up as if attending a special event. Those were relatively small planes, the service was good and the airports were manageable. The Boeing 747, introduced in 1970, was the final insult, ushering in mass air travel and lowering general standards of service and aesthetics, bringing cramped seats, poor cuisine and overworked staffs. The jumbos also threw airport terminals into chaos because none were designed to handle such crowds. Architects and planners responded with sprawling, mall-like terminals that stripped away the final vestiges of romance. Nor did the threat of hijacking and terrorism help. Being scanned by machines or interrogated by poorly trained personnel is never sexy.
DG:In that book, you write about an airport sign that says, "Excuse our appearances. We are tearing down yesterday to make room for tomorrow." You write, "But the idealized 'tomorrow' never comes." How does architecture relate to cultural aspiration?
AG: For me, architecture is ONLY interesting as far as it reflects cultural aspiration and the prevailing spirit of the day. Almost all of my books have been about social history reflected in the built environment: Weekend Utopia looked at how the modernist beach houses of the post-war period were idealized icons of Cold War aspiration (the flip side of all those basement A-bomb shelters.) Naked Airport traced the evolution of the airport as a symbolic as well as functional "artifact," one that by its very nature could never live up to its utopian promise. Kennedy International, for instance, was designed in the late 1950s to be a showcase for US-style democracy (vs. Soviet-style communism) with an eclectic array of architectural styles, formal gardens, fountains, reflecting pools, chapels, etc. to evoke a welcoming "Ellis Island of the Air." In my most recent book, Spaced Out, I wanted to document, and in a sense reclaim, the trippy environments of the psychedelic sixties and show how they reflected the cosmic aspirations of that generation.
DG:Hippie dwellings seem too grungy for glamour, but they do (or did) have a certain romance. What attracted you to that subject?
Hey! I think hippie culture is very high fashion, whatever that means, and it seems more relevant now than ever with so much renewed interest in green/sustainable design, planetary survival, living simply and bling-less. (Just before Christmas, I was involved in a big "Have a Happy Hippie Holiday" event at Barney's in NYC that Simon Doonan conceived.) At some point I realized that the sixties were a major cultural renaissance and not merely a youth revolt. What attracted me was the wild exuberance and innocence, the seeking of expanded consciousness and new kinds of spirituality, especially in light of Bush/Cheney's fear mongering and the culture of control that arose after 9/11. I suppose the book was also a way to reconnect with my own adolescent wanderings.
DG:What surprised you when you did the research?
AG: Everything surprised me. All of my assumptions and prejudices went out the window. It turns out that the official version of the 60s was a complete distortion of fact. I grew up during that period but was too young to really participate as a mover/shaper. By the time I was eighteen it seemed over and then, suddenly, everyone was dissing the movement as an aberration. (Of course, Altamont and Charlie Manson didn't help.) I wanted to go back and make a narrative that wasn't dumbed down or dismissive. I tried to be as generous and open-minded as possible. (My wife would point out wherever my text became too judgmental.) Everyone I interviewed had a different story: a million mini revolutions happening at the same time, sometimes overlapping, sometimes taking place simultaneously but separately, and very little of it was documented. The outlaw architects and builders I researched were trying to reinvent the very idea of human community; replace the conventional family with tribal patterns; expand consciousness; live in harmony with nature; work with recycled materials; live off grid; create revolutionary structures like geodesic domes, yurts and organically curving womb rooms. It's easy enough to make fun of them today but they may be the ones that end up having the last laugh.
DG: In Spaced Out, you write about the "reckless longing for other states of being." Is that longing something that can be expressed architecturally? Was it inevitably disappointed?
AG: Yes, I think that longing was expressed architecturally, but unfortunately we don't have many monuments from that period as reference points. I began the book with a visit to Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri's sustainable city in the Arizona desert, because it still exists. But most of the architectural spaces from that period were more insubstantial and didn't survive. Early psychedelic explorers described how corners dissolved, hard edges softened, straight lines curved, colors exploded, ceilings and floors blew away. This new kind of spatial experience was translated into all kinds of temporary environments (some called it "LSDesign"): crash pads, womb rooms, teepees, tents, tree-houses and basic shelter built out of unstable materials like mud, straw bales, recycled wood or blown polyurethane. But the temporality was also what made theses structures beautiful. The counter culture was all about being in the moment so who was worrying about resale value or termites? Yes, of course, it is bound to disappoint because it can't last very long. You do eventually get sick of leaky roofs, shared communal spaces and eating out of the same bean pot. But to me that was what was so compelling about the period: this reckless sense of abandon, that anything was possible, that yes, society could be reinvented and rebuilt from the ground up. I think we're seeing this legacy reconstitute itself today.
DG:You now write for the WSJ's luxury-oriented magazine. How has the financial crisis affected what stories you do? Is there room for luxury and aspiration in the current environment?
AG: Yes, I think "luxury" and "aspiration" are being substantially redefined and down-sized, and that is obviously a good thing. There's a noticeable turning away from conspicuous excess. I'm certainly not writing about giant MacMansions in the Hamptons or architectural ego trips. I just published a story in our last issue about a group of small guest huts on wheels that Tom Kundig designed in Washington State: "the architectural equivalent of sack cloth and ash," is how I described the rusting steel walls and plywood interiors.
The client had plenty of money and could have built anything but he chose to make a statement. The huts are simple but incredibly elegant. I'm working on a story for the next issue about how young architects are donating their services to design affordable housing, schools and community parks. This is a promising, and inspiring, trend.And yes, there's room for luxury and aspiration in the current environment but the days of unapologetic Greed (with a capital "G") are over.
As I've suggested in The Atlantic, Watchmen
is the Sunset Boulevard
of superhero comics: a mythic debunking that, for all its revisionism, depends on the audience's appreciation for the original glamour of its subject.
Dave Gibbons, the graphic novel's illustrator, was at Borders in Century City yesterday. After the long line of fans had cleared, I asked him a few questions about the glamour of superheroes. He talked enthusiastically about the transformation represented by superheroes' costumes and gear and about the glamour of heroism himself. But, most emphatically, he disagreed with my use of the word debunk to describe Watchmen's relation to superhero glamour.
"Alan Moore and I loved superheroes," he said.
The original Watchmen, like most comic books (or Dickens novels), came out in installments. Whenever an issue ended on a particularly bleak or revisionist note, Gibbons said, they'd start the next one with a glimpse of the wonder of being a superhero.
In an interview with Adam Rogers of Wired, Gibbons praised the Watchmen movie for capturing the geek glamour of superheroes:
"I think because Dan Dreiberg, Nite Owl, is kind of the geek superhero. He's the one that—well, he's the one that I would be, perhaps the one that you would be as well. I just love all of those gadgets and the car, and the whole feeling of that underground lair I thought they captured beautifully in the movie. And the whole, you know, glamour of being a superhero. As much as Watchmen is set in a real, kind of gritty world, there is that wonder of being a superhero, that joy you must feel when you sail off into the night in your wonderful machine and your cool costume. I think that's been captured wonderfully."
Not to mention Silk Spectre's perfect hair, which is as impractical as the capes Edna Mode banned in The Incredibles, but somehow never gets in the way.
Win Watchmen tickets: I have two tickets to the 12:15 a.m. show on Friday (just after midnight Thursday) at the Arclight in Hollywood for the first DG reader to send an email telling me which superhero you think is most glamorous and why. The tickets are in the regular theater, not the dome, in the middle of the 2nd row, seats B-16 and B-17. To enter, send your email to Virginia-at-DeepGlamour.net. Entries may be published in a future DG post.
Thanks to all who entered our last give away--Sarah S. of Palo Alto will be sip, sip, sipping her way to a glowing complexion with three months' worth of Glowelle.
Many with very sensitive skin already know that nothing compares to Cetaphil. The National Eczema Association agrees and has awarded the skincare line their seal of acceptance.
A jar of Cetaphil's Moisturing Cream is the prize for the first reader to email me at (kate AT deepglamour DOT net) and tell me from what language is the word eczema derived.
TypePad has a new comments format that allows threaded discussions and lets you keep track of all your comments on various blogs. It also lets commenters add a bit more personality--including a photo--to their comments. Set up your profile here and to see the format check out my test exchange with Kate here. (The deleted comment was mine as well.)
DeepGlamour explores the magic of glamour in its many manifestations, from movies, fashion, advertising, and cars to real estate, politics, sports, and travel.
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We also get money or in-kind compensation from places that have ads on the site, our contest prizes are donated, and Virginia receives review copies of lots of books (most of which never get mentioned on the site and end up donated to the Westwood branch of the L.A. Public Library). But you could probably figure that out on your own.
. Like Ayn Rand's novels, 
using her beautiful voice in this way while performing on a TV show. At times she seems to sing so softly we almost feel we are overhearing her sing to herself. The male members of the group sometimes join her by singing softly into their microphones, gently supporting her. Everything about the group’s performance, including the clothing, suggests casualness, as if they look and sound much the same as they would if we happened to find them singing in someone’s home. (Nonetheless, I find Krauss’ lovely voice and quiet beauty enchanting.)
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, which was a great resource when I was 
, takes on a less conventionally glamorous topic. What might these two topics have in common? "For me," Gordon told 
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links, including purchases you make while on 
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