'Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen' on view at the NYPL for the Performing Arts, Oct. 18, 2012 - Jan. 12, 2013.
With this post, we introduce our newest DG contributor, Jessica Barber. (If the post's formatting looks odd, please adjust the width of your browser window. TypePad can produce some odd effects with photo placement, and they aren't Jessica's fault.)--vp
Last month I had
the great pleasure of patronizing the beautifully curated costume exhibition Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen,
in a seemingly unlikely venue for such a topic: the New York Public
Library. The exhibition was organized by the Kent State University Museum, which was given 700 items from Hepburn's estate several years after her passing in 2003 at the age of 96. (The museum is renowned for its extensive costume collection, which contains more than 40,000 objects.) In collaboration with the NYPL, the exhibition included not only many of the costumes from the actress's long career in stage, film,
and television, but also examples of the casual everyday wardrobe that helped solidify her as an icon of “rebel chic.”
The fashion and costume designers
represented in the exhibition were a veritable who’s who of Hollywood names: Valentina, Howard Greer, Muriel King, Irene, and Cecil Beaton,
to name a few. Exhibited alongside garments and accessories were other film and stage ephemera such as posters, playbills, lobby cards, and even a makeup kit used by Hepburn, with various brushes, lipsticks, and Max Factor concealor still inside.
Black silk evening gown by Walter Plunkett, worn by Hepburn as Amanda Bonner in 'Adam's Rib' [MGM, 1949]; Kent State University Museum, KSUM 2010.12.4, Gift of the Estate of Katharine Hepburn. Designed to accent her 20" waist, this gown was colored red by the MGM publicity department for the lobby card, right.
Original lobby card for 'Adam's Rib' [MGM, 1949]; Kent State University Museum, KSUM A2010.3.14, Gift of Christopher P. Sullivan.
Katharine Hepburn, Self-portrait as Coco Chanel, 1970, watercolor on paper; Kent State University Museum, KSUM 2010.12.58, Gift of Katharine Hepburn
One of the most important points the exhibition illustrated was Hepburn's
high level of involvement in crafting her characters' wardrobes. More than many of her contemporaries, Hepburn was acutely aware of the importance of dress not only to the characters she portrayed but to the overall storyline as well. She worked closely with the designers of her film and stage ensembles (famed costume designer Edith Head once remarked that one "did not design for her," but "with her") and she even made sketches of her own costume designs. The muticolored pastel silk organza gown by Valentina that she wore as Jamie Coe Rowan in the 1942 film Without Love was one of many dresses that Hepburn personally
sketched, noting details of the fabric choice, the construction, and how
the skirt "simply floated."
Hepburn was also known to sketch self-portraits of herself as the characters she played. These captured the qualities she wanted to convey with each. Among the sketches included in the exhibition was her watercolor self-rendering as Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel, whom she played in the stage musical Coco (1969). Chanel was a hardworking couturière who was known for her stern personality, and this trait is skillfully conveyed by Hepburn's characterization.
Multicolored pastel silk organza gown by Valentina, worn by Hepburn as Jamie Coe Rowan in 'Without Love' [1942]; Kent State University Museum, KSUM 2010.12.62, Gift of the Estate of Katharine Hepburn.
Katharine Hepburn as Jamie Coe Rowan, wearing a multicolored pastel silk organza gown by Valentina in 'Without Love' [1942].
Cream silk georgette and crêpe de Chine nightgown by Irene, Kent State University Museum, KSUM A2010.12.3, Gift of the Estate of Katharine Hepburn.
Also of particular
note was how meticulously well-crafted and in rather good condition many of these garments were, such as this shirred and appliquéd cream silk georgette and crêpe de Chine nightgown designed by Irene and worn by Hepburn as Mary Matthews in State of the Union (MGM, 1948). As
any designer for the stage or screen will tell you, this is not always the case. Between the forgiving eye of the camera (or the forgiving distance of
the audience from the stage) and the many retakes and rehearsals, the film and
theatre costumes in museum collections are notorious for their shabbiness. But even from behind a wall of Plexiglas, it was clear that much
care had been put into their detailed construction. This is no doubt also a
reflection of how involved Hepburn was in the process of designing and creating
them, and of the high standard to which she worked. As the exhibition text noted,
she often had recreations of her costumes made for her everyday wardrobe, so it
is no surprise that they were made to stand the test of time.
Slacks and jodhpurs worn by Katharine Hepburn at the NYPL. Image credit: The Associated Press.
Of course no clothing exhibition of Katharine Hepburn's would be complete without at least a passing mention of her well-known preference for trousers in her everyday life. The exhibition included many pairs of slacks and jodhpurs skillfully installed on half-mannequins in poses that playfully evoked her unabashed preference for this masculine style, when it was still unheard of for women to express such sartorial sentiments.
With four Academy Awards for Best Actress (and eight additional Oscar nominations), Katharine Hepburn remains the most decorated actress in American film history. Even ten years after her passing, she continues to charm the public with her style, wit, and enduring performances. As noted
in the exhibition brochure, perhaps Calvin Klein summed up Hepburn’s mass
appeal best when he presented her with the CFDA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1985: “She
has truly epitomized the ultimate American woman. She’s vibrant, she’s
outspoken, she’s hardworking and she’s independent…and, fortunately for all of
us, she’s never been afraid to be comfortable.”
(Note: The
exhibition opened to the public in October 2012, and three months is the
generally accepted upper limit on exhibitions featuring costumes and textiles
because of their fragility, so the exhibition closed in January 2013. But, you
can still download a PDF copy of the handsomely illustrated exhibition brochure
here).
Glamour icon? London-based model, DJ, and scene-maker Alejandro Gocast is making an impressive go at that status. I first stumbled across Gocast on Facebook, as part of the revived New Romantic club scene in London that I’ve long admired and written about here on DeepGlamour. Arising in the early 1980s, the New Romantics represented a creative, dressed-to-impress music and style movement, post-punk, post-disco. Now, more than 30 years later, Gocast is one of a new generation of New Romantic club kids. And he cuts a spectacular image in modeling and club photos. I interviewed him exclusively for DeepGlamour.
CH: How do you describe what
you do? I think of you as a model, a glamorous nightclub personality, and a DJ.
But give DG a fuller picture of what you do?
Gocast: I would describe my
career as an eclectic one. As well as being known for what you have mentioned
in the London
scene, I also have a career in luxury events management. My life is not a
simple one.It can be challenging at
times keeping up with schedules, appointments, club nights, friends, family—the
list is endless, but then again life is for the living.
CH: Where are you from? Your Model Mayhem profile
says you are from Latin America, with parents
of Mexican and German descent, respectively. How old were you when you
moved to Britain?
Gocast: That is one tricky
question. I am actually British, although I was born in Mexico. I have
lived in London
since a very young age. However, my mother language is Spanish, therefore (unfortunately)
I do not have the honor of speaking with an English accent. My “genetic”
background has indeed German from my dad’s side and Mexican from my mother’s. I
hope this all makes sense.
CH: You have such a
distinct look, one that I would describe as exotic and androgynous. Not
what most people might think of as a typical male model. How would you describe
your style image? And how did you discover and develop that image? (Did you get started in the new New Romantic club scene in London, or was it some
other inspiration?)
Gocast: My image definitely
started in the London
club scene. I used to go out to “normal” clubs and bars, but always feeling
that I was not quite suitable for them, I started to look for a more arty
environment and played around with different looks, which I still do. Since I
have always had a thing for the New Romantic style, I decided to become “re-born”
into a new way, more in sync with my inner personality and my personal opinion
in life, which is a very simple one: be who you are.
CH: What are the Blitz Kids?
Gocast: The Blitz Kids were a group of young people who
frequented the Blitz nightclub in Covent Garden, London
in the very early 1980s and are credited with launching the New Romantic
cultural movement. Among their number is a good friend of mine, Steve Strange,
also Boy George
and his friends Marilyn and Alice Temple, Perri Lister,
Princess
Julia, Philip Sallon, Carl Teper and Martin
Degville (later to be the frontman of Tony James's Sigue Sigue
Sputnik). The club was known for its outrageous style of clothes and
make-up for both sexes, while it was also the birthplace of several pop groups.
There is an official website for this, on which I actually also feature, you
can visit it here.
CH: What musicians and bands
are atop your current playlist? What musicians and bands are lifelong
favorites?
Gocast: I have a wide range of
taste when it comes down to music, and also quite extreme. I go from hardcore
metal to Kate Bush. My personal music player is full of extremes. I do not
really focus my attention to one artist or band. Since you asked, a few on my
playlists at the moment are Garbage, JLo, Amanda Lear, Tribal House, Korn, Dead
or Alive, Donna Summer, Kate Bush, Siouxie and the Banshees… see what I mean?
CH: You've worked with
numerous artists and designers. Perhaps one of my favorite of your
collaborations has been with Marko
Mitanovski, a favorite designer of Lady Gaga. When I first viewed his
fashions, I was truly astonished - they are strange and intriguing and elegant. Anthropomorphic creatures in black and white. How did you come to
model for Mitanovski?
Gocast: I met Marko at one of
my clubs, “THE FACE.” He was a guest there, and the moment we met we knew we
would be working together. It was the right chemistry and we also get along
really well. It is indeed a pleasure to work with him. I can’t wait for his
next collection! I love his dramatic design style.
CH: Is there a designer
you wear most often right now?
Gocast: I wear a lot of
pieces from various artists, and it is just a question of blending and matching
them to create my night-out style. I recently worked with Dane Goulding,
who designed for the Spice Girls. He has some truly amazing pieces.
CH: You've been in a few
fashion-art short films. I thought "The
Dionysian" released in 2011 was really beautiful, and you looked darkly
enchanting wearing lace and a high collar. And enormous spidery eyelashes. What
was that experience like? What sort of direction were you given in the film, in
terms of posing or projecting a certain image?
Gocast: This film was shot in London, in December. It
was a very cold night and the director knew exactly what he wanted. Since we
shared the same vision, I fit perfectly in the film. This film is going to an
exhibition in Paris
this year. I have worked behind and in front and the camera for a few years
now, and the experience is always the same for me, exciting and always looking
forward to seeing the final creation.
CH: You starred in another
fashion/art film called "Perform
Nijinsky," which was produced by the very talented cabaret performer Mr. Pustra. Clearly the film was something
of an homage to the early 20th-century Ballet Russes legend, Vaslav
Nijinsky. Can you tell DG more about that film project?
Gocast: Pustra is a good
friend and I am also an admirer of his work. Together with Dorota Mulczynska, the
vision of a morphed early 20th Century Ballet Russes was created into a
short film, celebrating and honoring Nijinsky.
CH: Do you often do your own
make up for photo shoots and club nights? Or do you more often work with a make
up artist?
Gocast: For photo shoots I do
work closely with Stephanie
Stokkvik, a Norwegian high fashion make up artist. I have learned so much
from her. If you have time, have a look for her on the net—she is amazing! When
I go out, I normally “paint my face” on my own.
CH: Who is your top style
icon?
Gocast: I am afraid I do not
have one.
CH: When you travel around on
everyday errands, to the grocery and laundromat and whatnot, how do you look
and dress?
Gocast: You would not
recognize me, that’s all I call say. I try to go under the radar when out and
about on my personal life in order to give some space to myself and my
close friends and family.
CH: When you aren't
working, what do you do for fun?
Gocast: I am a bit of a geek.
I own a PS3 and a whole bunch of games. I enjoy also watching horror movies
with friends.
CH: What is your dream
vacation destination?
Gocast: My other half loves
traveling, and I have been lucky to have been to and seen some amazing tropical
paradises. My favorite places.
CH: Do you have favorite
perfumes/colognes?
Gocast: Yes, I am currently
about to finish “Un Jardin Sur Le Nil” by Hermès, and my next fragrance will be from Diptyque Paris.
CH: What are your go-to make
up and skin care products?
Gocast: Any good moisturizer
does, really, not any favorites in particular.
CH: What professional goals do
you set for yourself? Are there particular photographers, artists, or
designers you long to work with? Or, do you have something else in mind
quite different from what you are doing now?
Gocast: I am shooting a few
more fashion films this upcoming year and planning on starting some sketches
for my own collection. However, I must keep this under wraps. I am pretty much
open to work with anyone - as long as the chemistry is there, anything is
possible.
CH: What are your New Years
Eve plans?
Gocast: I am spending New Years
Eve with a good friend of mine. She runs a club in Bricklane, from which I will
also be throwing another infamous club night soon. It is a very intimate
space with limited capacity, which is just what I like.
Glamorous
icon? London-based model, DJ, and scene-maker Alejandro Gocast is making an
impressive go at that status. I first stumbled across Gocast on Facebook, as
part of the revived New Romantic club scene in London that I’ve long admired and written
about here on Deepglamour. Arising in the early 1980s, the New Romantics represented
a creative, well-dressed, well-coiffed music and style movement, post-punk, post-disco.
Now, some 30 years later, Gocast is one of a new generation of New Romantic
club kids. And he’s spectacular image in photos. I interviewed him exclusively
for Deepglamour.
CH: How do you describe what
you do? I think of you as a model, a glamorous nightclub personality, and a DJ.
But give DG a fuller picture of what you do?
Gocast: I would describe my
career as an eclectic one. As well as being known for what you have mentioned
in the London
scene, I also have a career in luxury events management. My life is not a
simple one.It can be challenging at
times keeping up with schedules, appointments, club nights, friends, family - the
list is endless, but then again life is for the living.
CH: Where are you from?
Your Model Mayhem profile
says you are from Latin America, with parents
of Mexican and German descent, respectively. How old were you when you
moved to Britain?
Gocast: That is one tricky
question. I am actually British, although I was born in Mexico. I have
lived in London
since a very young age. However, my mother language is Spanish, therefore (unfortunately)
I do not have the honor of speaking with an English accent. My “genetic”
background has indeed German from my dad’s side and Mexican from my mother’s. I
hope this all makes sense.
CH: You have such a
distinct look, one that I would describe as exotic and androgynous. Not
what most people might think of as a typical male model. How would you describe
your style image? And how did you discover and develop that image?
(Did you get started in the new New Romantic club scene in London, or was it some
other inspiration?)
Gocast: My image definitely
started in the London
club scene. I used to go out to “normal” clubs and bars, but always feeling
that I was not quite suitable for them, I started to look for a more arty
environment and played around with different looks, which I still do. Since I
have always had a thing for the New Romantic style, I decided to become “re-born”
into a new way, more in sync with my inner personality and my personal opinion
in life, which is a very simple one: be who you are.
CH: What musicians and bands
are atop your current playlist? What musicians and bands are lifelong
favorites?
Gocast: I have a wide range of
taste when it comes down to music, and also quite extreme. I go from hardcore
metal to Kate Bush. My personal music player is full of extremes. I do not
really focus my attention to one artist or band. Since you asked, I a few of my
playlists at the moment are Gargabe, JLo, Amanda Lear, Tribal House, Korn, Dead
or Alive, Donna Summer, Kate Bush, Siouxie and the Banshees… see what I mean?
CH: You've worked with
numerous artists and designers. Perhaps one of my favorite of your
collaborations has been with Marko
Mitanovski, a favorite designer of Lady Gaga. When I first viewed his
fashions, I was truly astonished - they are strange and intriguing and elegant.
Anthropomorphic creatures in black and white. How did you come to
model for Mitanovski?
Gocast: I met Marko at one of
my clubs, “THE FACE.” He was a guest there, and the moment we met we knew we
would be working together. It was the right chemistry and we also get along
really well. It is indeed a pleasure to work with him. I can’t wait for his
next collection! I love his dramatic design style.
CH: Is there a designer
you wear most often right now?
Gocast: I wear a lot of
pieces from various artists, and it is just a question of blending and matching
them to create my night-out style. I recently worked with Dane Goulding,
who designed for the Spice Girls. He has some truly amazing pieces.
CH: You've been in a few
fashion-art short films. I thought "The
Dionysian" released in 2011 was really beautiful and you looked darkly
enchanting wearing lace and a high collar. And enormous spidery eyelashes. What
was that experience like? What sort of direction were you given in the film, in
terms of posing or projecting a certain image?
Gocast: This film was shot in London, in December. It
was a very cold night and the director knew exactly what he wanted. Since we
shared the same vision, I fit perfectly in the film. This film is going to an
exhibition in Paris
this year. I have worked behind and in front and the camera for a few years
now, and the experience is always the same for me, exciting and always looking
forward to seeing the final creation.
CH: You starred in another
fashion/art film called "Perform
Nijinsky," which was produced by the very talented cabaret performer Mr. Pustra. Clearly the film was something
of an homage to the early 20th Century Ballet Russes legend, Vaslav
Nijinsky. Can you tell DG more about that film project?
Gocast: Pustra is a good
friend and I am also an admirer of his work. Together with Dorota Mulczynska, the
vision of a morphed early 20th Century Ballet Russes was created into a
short film, celebrating and honoring Nijinsky.
Glamorous
icon? London-based model, DJ, and scene-maker Alejandro Gocast is making an
impressive go at that status. I first stumbled across Gocast on Facebook, as
part of the revived New Romantic club scene in London that I’ve long admired and written
about here on Deepglamour. Arising in the early 1980s, the New Romantics represented
a creative, well-dressed, well-coiffed music and style movement, post-punk, post-disco.
Now, some 30 years later, Gocast is one of a new generation of New Romantic
club kids. And he’s spectacular image in photos. I interviewed him exclusively
for Deepglamour.
CH: How do you describe what
you do? I think of you as a model, a glamorous nightclub personality, and a DJ.
But give DG a fuller picture of what you do?
Gocast: I would describe my
career as an eclectic one. As well as being known for what you have mentioned
in the London
scene, I also have a career in luxury events management. My life is not a
simple one.It can be challenging at
times keeping up with schedules, appointments, club nights, friends, family - the
list is endless, but then again life is for the living.
CH: Where are you from?
Your Model Mayhem profile
says you are from Latin America, with parents
of Mexican and German descent, respectively. How old were you when you
moved to Britain?
Gocast: That is one tricky
question. I am actually British, although I was born in Mexico. I have
lived in London
since a very young age. However, my mother language is Spanish, therefore (unfortunately)
I do not have the honor of speaking with an English accent. My “genetic”
background has indeed German from my dad’s side and Mexican from my mother’s. I
hope this all makes sense.
CH: You have such a
distinct look, one that I would describe as exotic and androgynous. Not
what most people might think of as a typical male model. How would you describe
your style image? And how did you discover and develop that image?
(Did you get started in the new New Romantic club scene in London, or was it some
other inspiration?)
Gocast: My image definitely
started in the London
club scene. I used to go out to “normal” clubs and bars, but always feeling
that I was not quite suitable for them, I started to look for a more arty
environment and played around with different looks, which I still do. Since I
have always had a thing for the New Romantic style, I decided to become “re-born”
into a new way, more in sync with my inner personality and my personal opinion
in life, which is a very simple one: be who you are.
CH: What musicians and bands
are atop your current playlist? What musicians and bands are lifelong
favorites?
Gocast: I have a wide range of
taste when it comes down to music, and also quite extreme. I go from hardcore
metal to Kate Bush. My personal music player is full of extremes. I do not
really focus my attention to one artist or band. Since you asked, I a few of my
playlists at the moment are Gargabe, JLo, Amanda Lear, Tribal House, Korn, Dead
or Alive, Donna Summer, Kate Bush, Siouxie and the Banshees… see what I mean?
CH: You've worked with
numerous artists and designers. Perhaps one of my favorite of your
collaborations has been with Marko
Mitanovski, a favorite designer of Lady Gaga. When I first viewed his
fashions, I was truly astonished - they are strange and intriguing and elegant.
Anthropomorphic creatures in black and white. How did you come to
model for Mitanovski?
Gocast: I met Marko at one of
my clubs, “THE FACE.” He was a guest there, and the moment we met we knew we
would be working together. It was the right chemistry and we also get along
really well. It is indeed a pleasure to work with him. I can’t wait for his
next collection! I love his dramatic design style.
CH: Is there a designer
you wear most often right now?
Gocast: I wear a lot of
pieces from various artists, and it is just a question of blending and matching
them to create my night-out style. I recently worked with Dane Goulding,
who designed for the Spice Girls. He has some truly amazing pieces.
CH: You've been in a few
fashion-art short films. I thought "The
Dionysian" released in 2011 was really beautiful and you looked darkly
enchanting wearing lace and a high collar. And enormous spidery eyelashes. What
was that experience like? What sort of direction were you given in the film, in
terms of posing or projecting a certain image?
Gocast: This film was shot in London, in December. It
was a very cold night and the director knew exactly what he wanted. Since we
shared the same vision, I fit perfectly in the film. This film is going to an
exhibition in Paris
this year. I have worked behind and in front and the camera for a few years
now, and the experience is always the same for me, exciting and always looking
forward to seeing the final creation.
CH: You starred in another
fashion/art film called "Perform
Nijinsky," which was produced by the very talented cabaret performer Mr. Pustra. Clearly the film was something
of an homage to the early 20th Century Ballet Russes legend, Vaslav
Nijinsky. Can you tell DG more about that film project?
Gocast: Pustra is a good
friend and I am also an admirer of his work. Together with Dorota Mulczynska, the
vision of a morphed early 20th Century Ballet Russes was created into a
short film, celebrating and honoring Nijinsky.
CH: Do you often do your own
make up for photo shoots and club nights? Or do you more often work with a make
up artist?
Gocast: For photo shoots I do
work closely with Stephanie
Stokkvik, a Norwegian high fashion make up artist. I have learned so much
from her. If you have time, have a look for her on the net - she is amazing! When
I go out, I normally “paint my face” on my own.
CH: Who is your top style
icon?
Gocast: I am afraid I do not
have one.
CH: When you travel around on
everyday errands, to the grocery and laundromat and whatnot, how do you look
and dress?
Gocast: You would not
recognize me, that’s all I call say. I try to go under the radar when out and
about on my personal life in order to give some space to myself and my
close friends and family.
CH: When you aren't
working, what do you do for fun?
Gocast: I am a bit of a geek.
I own a PS3 and a whole bunch of games. I enjoy also watching horror movies
with friends.
CH: What is your dream
vacation destination?
Gocast: My other half loves
traveling, and I have been lucky to have been to and seen some amazing tropical
paradises. My favorite places.
CH: Do you have favorite
perfumes/colognes?
Gocast: Yes, I am currently
about to finish “Un Jardin Sur Le Nil” by Hermes, and my next fragrance will be from Diptyque Paris.
CH: What are your go-to make
up and skin care products?
Gocast: Any good moisturizer
does, really, not any favorites in particular.
CH: What professional goals do
you set for yourself? Are there particular photographers, artists, or
designers you long to work with? Or, do you have something else in mind
quite different from what you are doing now?
Gocast: I am shooting a few
more fashion films this upcoming year and planning on starting some sketches
for my own collection. However, I must keep this under wraps. I am pretty much
open to work with anyone - as long as the chemistry is there, anything is
possible.
CH: What are your New Years
Eve plans?
Gocast: I am spending New Years
Eve with a good friend of mine. She runs a club in Bricklane, from which I will
also be throwing another infamous club night soon. It is a very intimate
space with limited capacity, which is just what I like.
CH: Do you often do your own
make up for photo shoots and club nights? Or do you more often work with a make
up artist?
Gocast: For photo shoots I do
work closely with Stephanie
Stokkvik, a Norwegian high fashion make up artist. I have learned so much
from her. If you have time, have a look for her on the net - she is amazing! When
I go out, I normally “paint my face” on my own.
CH: Who is your top style
icon?
Gocast: I am afraid I do not
have one.
CH: When you travel around on
everyday errands, to the grocery and laundromat and whatnot, how do you look
and dress?
Gocast: You would not
recognize me, that’s all I call say. I try to go under the radar when out and
about on my personal life in order to give some space to myself and my
close friends and family.
CH: When you aren't
working, what do you do for fun?
Gocast: I am a bit of a geek.
I own a PS3 and a whole bunch of games. I enjoy also watching horror movies
with friends.
CH: What is your dream
vacation destination?
Gocast: My other half loves
traveling, and I have been lucky to have been to and seen some amazing tropical
paradises. My favorite places.
CH: Do you have favorite
perfumes/colognes?
Gocast: Yes, I am currently
about to finish “Un Jardin Sur Le Nil” by Hermes, and my next fragrance will be from Diptyque Paris.
CH: What are your go-to make
up and skin care products?
Gocast: Any good moisturizer
does, really, not any favorites in particular.
CH: What professional goals do
you set for yourself? Are there particular photographers, artists, or
designers you long to work with? Or, do you have something else in mind
quite different from what you are doing now?
Gocast: I am shooting a few
more fashion films this upcoming year and planning on starting some sketches
for my own collection. However, I must keep this under wraps. I am pretty much
open to work with anyone - as long as the chemistry is there, anything is
possible.
CH: What are your New Years
Eve plans?
Gocast: I am spending New Years
Eve with a good friend of mine. She runs a club in Bricklane, from which I will
also be throwing another infamous club night soon. It is a very intimate
space with limited capacity, which is just what I like.
In a survey of the James Bond movies, pegged to the opening of Skyfall, Slate's Isaac Chotiner points to a quality essential to 007's appeal:
James Bond is not a “realistic” character; real people occasionally smile. But he is a compelling and distinct one. With the right leading man, Bond is just human enough to be believable—and yet sufficiently aloof and suave to appear mostly untroubled by the world’s real worries. He thus provides just the right amount of escapism. The best fantasies are those that appear not entirely unattainable.
This observation offers an insight into why Bond used to be the quintessentially glamorous male figure. Glamour offers an emotionally specific version of escapism. It does not merely stir adrenaline or laughter. Rather, glamour provides a way to imaginatively transcend the constraints and burdens of everyday life. For a moment at least, it makes us feel that our greatest yearnings are achievable, that the impossible is possible, that we are not stuck with the life we have.
As Bond/Fleming sits in America and tucks into a mountain of crabs and melted butter, gorges on steak ‘so soft you can cut it with a fork’ and slurps another giant martini it becomes an almost pornographic contrast with the cable-knit sweaters and briarwood pipes, trad-jazz-revival and milk-bar world he had flown away from. As Felix Leiter in the book of Thunderball watches from a helicopter through his binoculars a naked girl sunbathing on a yacht and yells to Bond, ‘Natural blonde,’ Fleming’s original, chilblained, earnest British reader, with his uncontrollable flashbacks to the Burmese jungle and ill-informed keenness on Harald Macmillan, must have flung the novel across the room in despair.
Skyfall continues the Daniel Craig movies’ deglamorization of Bond. Here, he epitomizes not the old easy grace but, as M says in his premature obituary, “British perseverance.” The film is a celebration of the world the old Bond offered audiences escape from. This stoic, aging 007 belongs to the tough world of Tennyson, Churchill, and Margaret Thatcher, not the Jet Set. He struggles, suffers, and eventually wins out.
We don’t long to live in his world. We fear we already do.
[This post is by new DG contributor Cosmo Wenman.--vp]
Virginia recently tweeted and posted on Facebook asking, "What photos should absolutely be in a book on glamour?"
While putting together this collection of recommendations from pop-culture, I sought out the two photos below, of Sean Young in Blade Runner and Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. But it wasn't until I saw them side by side that I realized how similar they are. Not only do both women know how to hold the hell out of a cigarette, but the images' contexts are nearly identical.
Both are from interrogation scenes in which the women are suspected of concealing their true natures. Both characters are extremely poised and confident, and both become romantically involved with their interrogators. There are several other parallels as well. I put together a comparison:
These twin scenes are following the same formula and mix of glamorous elements: smoking (even the question of permission to smoke), composure and confidence, deception, emotional distance, and danger. Is there an older film noir scene both these movies are paying homage to?
BTW, Virginia told me she thinks the Sean Young photo "is a little too calculatedly retro for my purposes. It lacks sprezzatura. It's more like an imitation of glamorous photos from the '40s." I think it evokes glamour, but I know what Virginia means - Sean Young's character does look almost artificial...
I spent Saturday at the giant auction of costumes, props, and other Hollywood memorabilia that Debbie Reynolds had collected over decades in hopes of establishing a museum. (The financial collapse of her most recent attempt led to the auction.)
The headline story was that Marilyn Monroe’s famous “subway dress” from The Seven Year Itchsold for $5.658 million—a hammer price of $4.6 million plus a 23% buyer's premium of $1.058 million, not to mention an additional $551,655 in sales tax.
That dress, however, was only one of 587 lots that included not only other iconic costumes—most notably Audrey Hepburn’s Ascot dress and hat from My Fair Lady, which is more important in the history of design than Marilyn’s dress and went for $4.551 million—but also props, cameras, concept drawings, posters, and an archive of W.C. Fields contracts, letters, and notes for jokes. At the auction’s end, an auction house employee reported that the total sales topped $18 million. (The final total was in fact $22.8 million.)
I'll publish something more analytical later, but I thought I’d share a few notes here. (For more detail, here’s a good report on the procedings. Silver Screen Modiste blogger Christian Esquevin, with whom I spoke as we waited for the doors to open, provides smart context and good costume photos.)
Joe Maddalena introduces Debbie Reynolds
On Friday, Joe Maddalena, the owner of auction house Profiles in History, was confidently predicting that the auction, which started at noon, should be over by 7:00 p.m.. Instead, it lasted until 1:20 a.m. One reason was the complexity of the setup: two websites for Internet bidding, a large phone bank taking phone bids, and a downstairs gallery for the overflow crowd that couldn’t be accommodated in the main Paley Center auditorium; gallery bids came in by phone to a representative in the auditorium.
But the main reason for the late hour was that the bidding went so high, meaning each sale took longer than usual. Even with an opening bid of $60,000 for Charlie Chaplin's bowler hat, compared to the catalog estimate of $20,000-$30,000, it took a lot of $2,500 increments to reach the final $110,000. (The delays were particularly excruciating for the 13 W.C. Fields lots early on, which sold for relatively modest amounts sometimes arrived at in $50 increments.) The auctioneer did not speed-talk, making sure instead that everyone who might bid did so. He therefore allowed not only for technical delays but for lulls while people contemplated additional bids.
She's a princess!
When the bidding lulled, Debbie Reynolds generally piped up with a wisecrack to get things going. Her standard was, “I paid more than that.” Sometimes she pitched the lots’ qualities, QVC-style: “That's a leather seat. It’s really beautiful.” “That’s real mink.”
She also deployed sexual innuendo: “You know what you could do on that couch,” “You don't know what Ty Power did in there,” and the audience favorite: “Mae West didn’t even have a chest like that.”
At one sad moment, however, Reynolds reversed her usual plea. After the first few bids for lot 280, the pastel rainbow-hued ballgown worn by Susan Hayward in With a Song in My Heart, she said, “It’s from me—don’t bid!” (Someone else was bidding on her behalf.) No luck. Paddle-holder #247, a Korean (not, as widely reported, Japanese) man who was the dominant bidder actually present in the room, persevered and eventually bought the dress for a hammer price of $3,000. It was one of his cheaper purchases of the day.
[Photos by Virginia Postrel. Permission to use freely granted with credit and link back to DeepGlamour.net]
Walking through Bloomingdale's, I was struck by this sign in the jewelry department. The Carolee jewelry company is pitching its line of pearls with photos of four pearl-wearing style icons: two American first ladies, Jackie Kennedy and Michelle Obama, both Democrats, and two foreign consorts, Eva Peron and Wallis Simpson, who, to put it politely, leaned fascist. (What, no Imelda Marcos? Too famous for shoes I guess.)
Now I realize that jewelry marketers should not be confused with historians, but if I were Michelle Obama I'd be offended. And if I were managing the Obama brand I'd certainly protest. If the White House can ask a noncontroversial windbreaker-maker to remove a billboard featuring a press photo of President Obama in its jacket, surely the first lady's staff can ask Carolee not to link Mrs. O with Evita.
It is, of course, possible that this is a sanctioned use of the first lady's image. To find out, since there's no press contact listed on Carolee's site, I posted a query to @Caroleejewelry on Twitter. (If someone were paying me to write, I'd call the company and the White House.) No response.
When Apple introduced the iPad last year, it added a new buzzword to technology marketing. The device, it declared, was not just "revolutionary," a tech-hype cliché, but "magical." Skeptics rolled their eyes, and one Apple fan even started an online petition against such superstitious language.
But the company stuck with the term. When Steve Jobs appeared on stage last week to unveil the iPad 2, which hit stores Friday, he said, "People laughed at us for using the word 'magical,' but, you know what, it's turned out to be magical."
Apple has long had an aura of trend-setting cool, but magic is a bolder—and more provocative— claim. In a promotional video, Jonathan Ive, the company's design chief, explains it this way: "When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical, and that's exactly what the iPad is." Mr. Ive is paraphrasing the famous pronouncement by Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction author and futurist, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
So in celebrating the iPad as magical, Apple is bragging that its customers haven't the foggiest idea how the machine works. The iPad is completely opaque. It is a sealed box. You can't see the circuitry or read the software code. You can't even change the battery.
Apple has long had an aura of trend-setting cool, but magic is a bolder—and more provocative— claim. In a promotional video, Jonathan Ive, the company's design chief, explains it this way: "When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical, and that's exactly what the iPad is." Mr. Ive is paraphrasing the famous pronouncement by Arthur C. Clarke, the science-fiction author and futurist, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
So in celebrating the iPad as magical, Apple is bragging that its customers haven't the foggiest idea how the machine works. The iPad is completely opaque. It is a sealed box. You can't see the circuitry or read the software code. You can't even change the battery.
To the contemporary eye, this George Hurell photo of Carole Lombard (part of an enormous auction this Friday and Saturday) seems strange. She looks beautiful, and the lighting and pose are glamorous. But what’s with the plastic sheeting? Is that a shower curtain to her left?
Behold the glamour of cellophane. Like diamonds or crystal, cellophane has a sparkling, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t quality. Although transparent, when crinkled and lit correctly it creates a teasing mystery. In Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle likens cellophane to “striptease, which achieved its effect by constantly making the unveiled body more remote.”Wrapped in cellophane, “products were available but untouchable and therefore inaccessible.”
In Hurrell’s photo, the shimmering plastic catches the light, creating a cool, translucent contrast to the soft opacity of Lombard’s feathered dress and the warmth of her skin. If you don’t associate plastic with cheapness, cellophane makes perfect sense as a glamorous material. Like glamour itself, it is alluringly artificial.In the 1920s and ’30s, cellophane’s appeal went beyond these intrinsic aesthetic properties. This new material epitomized high-tech modernity: “You’re the purple light of a summer night in Spain / You’re the National Gallery / You’re Garbo’s salary / You’re cellophane!” sang Cole Porter in "You're the Top!"
Judith Brown in Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form, which I reviewed along with the Gundle book here, devotes an entire chapter to cellophane. She is interested, she writes, in the material as “pure surface...a protective veneer from dusty reality.” And she notes its ubiquity in the popular culture of the 1920s and ’30s:
Cellophane tablecloths glitter in an upscale nightclub in the Astaire-Rogers blockbuster Swing Time (1936); cellophane also appears in an earlier Joan Crawford film, Dancing Lady (1933), in the transparent swags at the back of a dance set, and again in the Broadway musical staged within the film. in this film, the cellophane also appears in costume form: a group of black-attired old women, complete with bonnets, lace collars, wire glasses, and bent-over backs make their way into a futuristic beauty parlor and emerge as modern bombshells, perfectly artificial with cellophane outfits and what might be plastic hair. Cellophane similarly appears in a swanky Chinese nightclub as the “The Girls in Cellophane” take the stage in W. C. Fields’s International House (1933). The pages of Vogue magazine also mark cellophane as haute couture, here as the “cellophane toque” that makes a “deceptively simple” garment cutting edge by newly framing the model’s face in the most artificial of head covers; and again, as an arresting sight in this newspaper photograph of an urban street. Cellophane fashion staked out a turning point: cellophane was chic and, above all, now.
This Hurrell photo of Joan Crawford, whose negative is in the auction, is from Dancing Lady. Although Crawford is not literally wearing cellophane, her dress has a similar sparkling, translucent quality. It makes her look like a star.
Boston-based artist Ria Brodell doesn’t think of her work as glamorous, but when I happened upon her “Self Portraits” exhibit at the Kopeikin Gallery in West Hollywood, her drawings struck me as perfectly expressing the way glamour works as an imaginative process. Her drawings capture how she projected her ideal self onto slightly mysterious, impossibly graceful figures—in this case, male icons ranging from classic movie stars like Gene Kelly and Cary Grant to Catholic saints and children’s toys. Like her very different “Distant Lands” drawings, which depict strange and whimsical animals, the portraits are at once charming, sweet, and slightly subversive. (This YouTube video shows Ria at work on her Distant Lands creatures.) Her exhibit will be open until March 6.
DG: How did you select the figures you depicted yourself as in
“Self-Portraits”? Why these particular men?
Ria Brodell: The figures I chose were all men I connected with in some way as a kid. If I could have grown up to be a man, I would have been a man like them. Sometimes it was their style, the way they dressed, their hair, the way they carried themselves. Sometimes it was their über masculinity.
Of course, in regards to the movie stars, all of this came from their depictions in the movies and not necessarily their real selves.
As a kid I desperately wanted a fedora, but growing up in Idaho, the closest thing I could ever find was an “outback” hat. Which is not very close at all.
RB: When I began this series I remembered a drawing I made for my First Reconciliation book in second grade (I went to Catholic school). I had drawn a picture of St. Michael that I was very proud of and I showed it to my Grandma. She told me he looked more like He-Man. I remember feeling ashamed for some reason, perhaps knowing I should have shown St. Michael more reverence. I used to draw He-Man all the time, practicing over and over until his muscles looked right. Looking back now, He-Man and St. Michael had a similar appeal to me, strong warriors, fighting for good.
As far as what unites movie stars, saints, and toys like G.I. Joe and He-Man, for me they all represented an ideal, whether it was physical aesthetics or moral values. In combining them all for “The Handsome & The Holy” I was hoping to unite my “queer side” with my religious background because they are equally present in my life.
DG: Your drawings have been described as “achingly sincere,” “both earnest and humorous,” and “intently self-aware schmaltz.” Their humor is gentle and sweet, not ironic—juxtaposing He-Man and St. Michael is funny, but you are, at the same time, owning up to your desires to be like them. Is it hard for a contemporary artist to portray desire and identification without using irony to maintain your cool? Does glamour risk condemnation as kitsch?
RB: I don’t think I’m intentionally trying to be funny in all the drawings. I’m trying to be completely honest, but I think the juxtaposition of some of these subjects is just naturally odd and therefore funny. Sexuality, gender identity, and religion can be very serious, often complicated subjects. I want to create work that deals with these subjects in a simple and not heavy-handed way.
Of course there is always a risk of the work having unintended consequences, such as being deemed “kitsch.” With this work there is a bit of background information needed. On the surface they can appear to be just glamorous self-portraits or “dress-up” but my hope is that people look further than that and begin to think about gender identity and sexuality outside of our society’s strict definitions.
DG: One of your drawings is called “A Picnic With Audrey Hepburn.” It shows Audrey from the back, but there is no one with her. A critic described it as “a picture of mythic femininity, here elusive.” But the title suggests the perspective not of Audrey but of her unseen date, inviting viewers to project themselves into the scene. What inspired this drawing? What does Audrey Hepburn mean to you?
RB: As a teenager I became slightly obsessed with Audrey Hepburn after seeing her in “My Fair Lady.” She was not only beautiful and glamorous but also a humanitarian. For me, this drawing represents the complexity of figuring out ones sexuality, especially queer sexuality, the desire and simultaneous shame I felt. How could I possibly desire a woman and not just any woman, but Audrey Hepburn? Feeling unworthy of her, I chicken-out on our date.
Editor's note: With this post, Albina Colden, a psychologist and visual artist, joins DeepGlamour as a contributor.
It distressed me to learn the news of
J.D. Salinger's death. The man was 91 years old, so it should
hardly have come as a surprise. But in our collective
imagination, J.D. Salinger had long ceased to be a man and had become
a mythical figure.
The image of Salinger - living in
isolation in the New Hampshire mountains, wearing L.L. Bean, eating exotic health foods, writing maniacally, and stashing manuscripts in
his secret vault - had become timeless, and it was all we had. This mythological narrative invited our imaginations to sculpt it in any way we wished and
to infuse it with our own hopes and desires - or with our own
prejudices.
In the media, it was rather sad to see the news of Salinger's death compete with the release of the Apple i-Pad. But nonetheless it did
receive some coverage, and the coverage reflects our conflicted perceptions: notions of Salinger as a noble and
sensitive romantic who has influenced generations and could hold the
key to mysterious truths about the universe, versus notions of
Salinger as a controlling, misogynistic weirdo who has made all those
close to him miserable.
The New York Times describes Salinger's work as possibly the greatest of our time, but
in the same breath remarks that he is mostly “famous for not
wanting to be famous”. Bret Easton Ellis declares on twitter that he is happy about Salinger's death. CNN reminds us of his “affair with the
teenage Joyce Maynard” (though the wording was later changed), who was in fact a 19-year-old adult when she lived with Salinger. And of course, speculations abound as to whether there really are unpublished manuscripts in the vaults
that are rumored to be in his home. Perhaps he produced masterpieces
but instructed his lawyer to burn them. Or perhaps he scribbled
nonesense in his study day after day, or wrote nothing at all. With
his estate as protective of his privacy as Salinger himself had been,
we may never know the answer.
In 2005 I had just finished graduate
school and began my first job, at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
I moved into a house in a nearby town and discovered that I was
practically “neighbors” with J.D. Salinger - at least in the rural
sense, where the nearest neighbor can be a mile away. I knew where
Salinger lived, as many people in that area did. I passed the winding
road that led to his house on my commutes to work and back every day.
But I never saw Salinger and never attempted to see him - not even to
catch a glimpse at one of the local events he was said to always
attend. In retrospect, I had wondered at this restraint on my part,
especially as he was one of my favorite writers. But now I
think I understand: It wasn't so much restraint, as a means of
protecting myself against disillusionment. I did not want to
see Salinger, because I did not want to know which version of him was
real, if any.
In the end, it matters not a bit what
kind of a person Salinger was, whether there really are any
unpublished books in that vault, or for that matter, whether there is
a vault at all. In his existing body of work J.D. Salinger has given us a
great gift, and may he rest in peace.
“We didn’t fabricate her from thin air; she must have collaborated with the media, however unconsciously, to form her image and to preserve it (always the same smile, the same hairdo). Because we didn’t willfully make her up, but accepted her as part of our landscape, we may consider ourselves her beneficiaries and her audience, and we may consider her appearances—captured in photographs, whether authorized or unauthorized—to be a slow, serial, fragmented performance piece, drawn out over more than thirty years, and highly conceptual, its premises never articulated or codified. Jackie was a show—the Jackie O Show—but its plot was buried, its backers were invisible, and its spectacular special effects seemed unpremeditated, thoroughly natural.”
As readers who read my DoubleX piece on Amelia (and Amelia) know, I think the movie deservedly bombed, largely because Amelia Earhart is an intrinsically difficult subject for a biopic. As a glamorous icon, she is not a person but a persona, someone we “know” from the outside, for what she represents rather than who she actually is. Her distance and mystery are a big part of her allure. A movie preserves that appeal inevitably tends to be boring, while a movie that portrayed her as flawed (perhaps not such a great pilot) would lose its audience.
While I was writing that piece, I thought whether you could write a script about Earhart that preserved her glamour but wasn't emotionally flat. One idea would be to tell a story not about her but about someone who observes and is inspired by her. Another would be to emphasize the challenges and hazards of early aviation, something that Amelia did in its best moments but downplayed in favor of a flattened soap opera.
Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, a graphic novel aimed at tweens, does both. And while the book, written by Sarah Stewart Taylor and drawn by Ben Towle, doesn't have enough plot to make a movie, it demonstrates that the way to portray Earhart is, in fact, to use a sympathetic protagonist who admires her. The graphic novel makes the wise choice to show us Earhart through the eyes of an admirer, a girl who lives in the seafaring community of Trepassy, Newfoundland, and aspires to be a newspaper reporter. Located on the far eastern edge of North America, Trepassy is the point from which Earhart and other aviation pioneers took off for Europe. It's also a shipwreck-strewn place whose name essentially means "the dead."
In June of 1928, tweener Grace, the dubious townspeople and a mob of impatient newsmen wait for Earhart to finally get her plane in the air for a transatlantic flight. Grace yearns to leave the little village and to become a newspaper woman, so she observes the commotion and manages to get the aviator's personal encouragement in an interview before her successful departure. Taylor's lean script leaves much of Grace's feelings understated but easy to imagine. Towle's art is also emotionally restrained, but panels showing the bleak landscape—especially double-page spreads of what Earhart called “this broad ocean”—emphasize the courage of people willing to take ultimate risks. Astronaut Eileen Collins's introduction, which describes the inspiration she drew from Earhart's example, carries the theme to the present.
Grace's point of view preserves Amelia as a glamorous, somewhat mysterious figure who represents a different life. You can get a sense from this spread. (As always, click the images to see a larger version.)
I found myself agreeing completely with the first sentence of Kit Pollard’s Thanksgiving post: “One of the peculiar side effects of blogging is looking for your blogging subject in absolutely everything around you.” In addition to that feeling, as a result of reading DeepGlamour I have found myself interested in learning more about certain subjects, one of which has been the history of fashion.
The dress shown in the illustration was advertised in a Parisian paper in 1906. As Barbara Tuchman vividly describes in The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914
, the Belle Époque, the era just before World War I, was a period of extravagant luxury for European upper classes. So much so that wealthy, aristocratic women spent much of their day changing from one fashionable outfit to another.
When Étienne Balsan invited a young Coco Chanel to come to Royallieu, the chateau where he bred horses, she agreed and became his second mistress. She was ill-suited to the lifestyle of a kept woman, so she spent most of her days at the stables and became known for her ability to work with difficult horses. She amused Balsan and his pals because she was young, and could jump astride the back of a two-year-old stallion and gallop off.
Given this athleticism, you can imagine Chanel was dissatisfied with much of what women were expected to wear. Having been abandoned by her father as a child and raised in an orphanage, Chanel was fiercely determined to eventually be financially independent. Since she had been making her own clothes since she was a teenager, fashion seemed a possible avenue (despite the fact that the field was then dominated by men). Though she thought some women looked fine in Belle Époque fashions, she didn’t feel they suited her personally. Seeing that some men’s fashions offered more freedom of movement, some of her most successful designs were reinterpretations of male clothing, made convenient and stylish for women to wear. As Karbo relates, Chanel legend has it that she borrowed a pullover from her next lover, Boy Capel, while walking at the beach. Finding it inconvenient to put on, she took out a pair of scissors and cut the pullover up the front. And thus the basic concept of the cardigan was born.
Commenting on the chart post below, Charles Oliver asks, “Are glamour and charisma necessarily opposites? Can a person not possess both at the same time?” His suggestion is, of course, correct, as the guy in the photo demonstrates. Glamour and charisma are not mutually exclusive, though the combination is rare, requiring a hard-to-maintain balance between warmth and distance, connecting with audiences without becoming overly intimate.
As I suggested in my earlier post, some charismatic performers develop glamorous public personas. They draw audiences into their roles but maintain an alluring mystery in their off-stage lives. Think of classic divas like Maria Callas.
Glamour depends on the audience, so a charismatic person may also be glamorous to some audiences but not to others. A few years ago I was in London and happened to catch a television special on Billy Graham's landmark 1954 crusade there. Like most successful preachers, Graham possessed considerable charisma. But it had never occurred to me that he might be glamorous. In the Bible Belt, where I grew up, he was simply too familiar. But here were British interview subjects talking about him as this tall, handsome representative of exotic American culture—not just a persuasive Christian evangelist but an evocative, mysterious, exciting contrast to austerity Britain. He was, in midcentury London, not just charismatic but glamorous.
[John F. Kennedy in sunglasses from Library of Congress public domain collection.]
Amelia Earhart was daring, adventurous, modern, and beautiful, among the 20th century’s most enduring icons. Sixty years after her disappearance, high-profile advertising campaigns for Apple and the Gap were still employing her image as a symbol of independence and glamour. A movie about her must have seemed like a sure thing. Yet Amelia is a critical and commercial disaster. What went wrong?
It would be easy to blame the project’s specifics. Director Mira Nair did, after all, manage to turn Thackeray’s lively satire into the ponderous, unwatchable Vanity Fair. A less earnest director or more creative script might have produced a more interesting Amelia, one less reliant on half-hearted soap opera and more focused on the challenges of early aviation. But the real problem may be Amelia Earhart herself.
In the 1920s and ’30s, “the aviatrix was the ultimate glamorous and daring modern woman,” notes Kristen Lubben in Amelia Earhart: Image and Icon, the catalog for a 2007 exhibition of Earhart images at the International Center of Photography. Earhart, of course, was the ultimate glamorous aviatrix. She achieved that status not because she was the best female pilot—many were better—but because she was media-savvy and able to embody the public’s multiple aspirations. She was feminist yet feminine, casual yet elegant, modern yet wholesome. “Hers is the healthy curiosity of the clean mind and the strong body and a challenging rebuke to those of us who have damned the youth of the land,” declared a 1928 essayist who saw her as an antidote to Jazz Age decadence. He concluded, “What a girl!” Such a glamorous figure makes an effective advertising icon but an emotionally flattened protagonist. She loses her individuality.
During her life, Earhart was transformed from a person into a persona—idealized, distant, and glamorous, her mythic allure heightened by the mystery of her disappearance. The more time passes, the more her individuality recedes. “She has become an increasingly abstract symbol—of the thrill and danger of adventure, of the possibilities for women, and of the courage to break with … conventional expectations,” writes Lubben. Eternally young, Earhart remains unblemished from the kind of eccentricity or controversy—or ordinary individual complexity—that could make her a compelling subject for a modern biopic. To preserve her glamour, Amelia must keep her at a distance, without flaws, doubts, or character development. We learn nothing of the struggles of her youth, her political commitments, or her limits as a pilot. She ends the film essentially the same as she began it—as an icon.
Here, another recent film about a pioneering aviatrix presents a sharp contrast. Currently making the film-festival rounds and expected to air on public television in the spring, The Legend of Pancho Barnes and the Happy Bottom Riding Club is a straightforward documentary made on a tenth of Amelia’s production budget. Yet for all its still photos and talking heads, it is far more entertaining. While Amelia struggles against the glamour of its heroine, The Legend of Pancho Barnes is imbued with its protagonist’s charisma. The contrast between the two pilots, and the memories they left behind, illuminates the distinctions between these two often-conflated qualities.
The cryptic phrase “Virtuosity is some evidence of virtue,” occurs in Deirdre McCloskey’s book, The Rhetoric of Economics. Virtue aside, virtuosity is clearly evidence of commitment and hard work. In his book The Talent Code Daniel Coyle describes how repeated, focused practice of specific skills causes the involved neural pathways to be insulated with myelin, ultimately making these pathways as much as 3,000 times more efficient. He repeats what I have read elsewhere, that the usual amount of deep practice necessary to master a difficult sport or musical instrument at a virtuoso level is roughly 10,000 hours or about 10 years. Getting 10,000 hours of practice in ten years would mean spending an average of 2.75 hours every day in deep, focused practice. To do it in fewer years would require more hours of practice each day. Whether we are discussing playing an instrument, playing soccer, skateboarding, or playing tennis, a huge investment of time is required to become a virtuoso player or performer.
One long-term study of music students revealed the factor that most determined their long-term achievement was their initial feeling about how long they would continue to play their instrument. Those that progressed the most assumed they would continue to play their whole lives. This sense of commitment was key to achieving deep concentration when they were practicing, which is crucial to the development of these super-efficient neural pathways.
Coyle also reports that the inspiration to make such a powerful commitment typically comes from outside ourselves. If we see someone who has become successful in a field, then we might imagine that if we worked hard enough, then perhaps we too could be successful. When golfer Se Ri Pak (shown at right) came to the U.S. tour in 1998, she was the only Korean woman, but her extraordinary success inspired others. Ten years later there were 45 Korean women on the tour, and articles were being written about it was that they had come to dominate professional golf. This 2007 article is particularly interesting, discussing the discipline and purpose Korean families expect from children that show some talent. (Korea is also providing some of the best prepared young pianists and violinists.) Obviously, some native ability is required, but it is hard to imagine practicing your skills for 10,000 hours without having seen an example of what all those hours of practice might allow you to do.
In that sense, a sports star can become a glamorous figure to others because the star has achieved the level of mastery that they aspire to attain. But in our media-rich world, if a sports star happens to combine top-level skills and physical attractiveness, then they become even more valuable to sponsors, who hope to capitalize on the star’s commercial appeal. Some examples of sports figures whose looks have made their images highly marketable include David Beckham, Tom Brady, Andre Agassi, Rafael Nadal, Anna Kournikova, and Maria Sharapova (shown in the first photograph above introducing a line of Canon cameras). Sharapova is thought to make considerably more money with endorsements than she does by playing tennis.
“I have very expensive wallpaper.” So said Philip Johnson, architect of the modernist masterpiece Glass House, which he designed as his own residence in 1947 and inhabited until his death in 2005. Beyond its expense, Johnson’s glass walls create a glamorous atmosphere unique for a small suburban residence. Undoubtedly his lifestyle did much to enhance this feeling. The house was a setting for frequent salons and parties, hosting many luminaries of modern art and design. Johnson was so devoted to entertaining he had a hob in his kitchenette island removed so he could add an extra ice maker.
But the glamour of the house isn’t just about what happened inside; it emanates from the structure itself. Similarly, countless other glass buildings, from the Crystal Palace to the Burj Dubai (which contains a breathtaking 20 acres of glass) transcend the idea of buildings, becoming surreal settings of fascination and desire. Something about glass captures our imagination and creates glamour like no other architectural material.
Glass’s glamour arises from its physical properties: fragility, luminosity, and transparency. Rigid but delicate, glass is notoriously difficult to work with. It first appeared in architecture in ancient Rome around 100 AD, adorning only the most important buildings and expensive private homes. It remained a luxury through the middle ages, typically found in palaces and churches. Though glass is now ubiquitous, its use at large scale still feels lavish, and it wasn’t until the middle of the last century that technology allowed for the construction of multi-story glass facades such as those on Bunshaft’s Lever House and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, and the many other glass skyscrapers that comprise the Manhattan skyline.
Glass’s precarious nature, combined with its scintillating reflective surfaces, give it a jewel-like quality at any scale. Cinderella’s slipper was glass, embodying hope, fantasy, and royalty in one fragile token. The glass structures of the world are like Cinderella’s slipper writ large, containers of dreams that always feel a little bit impossible. I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, and the cube above the Fifth Avenue Apple Store that references it, have this gem-like presence. The same can’t be said for structures made with transparent plastics like acrylic or polycarbonate; poor cousins, too optically inert to stir our emotions.
Like all truly glamorous things, glass eludes us. It moves in a perpetual dance between two kinds of ephemerality. Lit from outside, it is luminous and reflective, taking on the character of what surrounds it. Johnson’s Glass House feels alive, an ever-shifting pattern of trees shimmering across its surfaces. Glass skyscrapers literally become pieces of sky, translucent blue by day and inky black at night. In this state, glass is like a mirror, restless and mysterious.
But light a glass structure from within, and it vanishes in another way, revealing its contents to the world. This glass is deceptively sheer. It yields to what’s behind it, inviting us to peer inside. It’s this invitation — to admiration and to voyeurism — that makes glass so special.
Inscribed in any glamorous object is the gaze which makes it so. Pull back from the object. Zoom out, and there is always someone watching and wanting, infusing it with the desire that is glamour’s driving force. Without a viewer through which fantasy can be filtered, there may be elegance or sophistication, but there can be no glamour.
Glass, with its tantalizing non-presence, creates the illusion that inside and outside are one. But not so fast. As anyone who has accidentally walked into a freshly-washed glass door will tell you, it’s a formidable barrier. This impenetrability is also part of its glamour. Glamour is an expression of a paradox: a fantasy so close you can feel yourself inside it, but so distant you must admire from afar. Glass facilitates this illusion better than any other material. Think of shop windows, museum exhibits, and jewelry display cases. Glass says look but don’t touch. It beckons to you to lose yourself in fantasy at the same time as it precludes you from making it a reality.
Playing directly with this paradox, the Standard Hotel has captured the essence of glass’s glamour in its 18-story New York tower. The hotel touts the spectacular views of the Hudson River from the picture windows in each room, but the real story is guests’ exhibitionist behavior, encouraged (and sometimes engaged in) by staff and management. Ostensibly about looking out, the allure is really about looking in. The glamour is in feeling admired and coveted inside the glass box — exposed, yet protected.
Johnson supposedly prized his house for its outward views. A nature-lover, he lit the house with the intention of making the natural surroundings visible rather than calling attention to the architecture, and he slept facing out towards his favorite view. But the house is also undeniably about looking in. Johnson considered the threshold to be outside the house, at the first point when you get a full view of it just past the stone wall that runs alongside the driveway. In the foyer of a typical home, you acclimate to the new environment whilst inside it; in Johnson’s schema, you are welcomed first by standing outside looking in. You must appreciate before you enter.
Glass is not a comfortable material, and Johnson was well aware of this. He never aspired to comfort in his home, but to an aesthetic purity. The Glass House existed not to coddle his senses, but to stimulate them. He has said:
...Comfort is not a function of beauty... purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful...sooner or later we will fit our buildings so that they can be used...where form comes from I don't know, but it has nothing at all to do with the functional or sociological aspects of our architecture.
Coco Chanel was a woman famous for her aphorisms. To cap off our week of Chanelore, Karen Karbo, author of The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, compiled a Top 10 list of those she considers the most interesting, including one from someone Karen calls Chanel’s “compatriot in upsetting the apple cart.” Can you spot the ringer? (Answer below the fold.)
1. “To be irreplaceable one must always be different.”
2. “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.”
3. “Fashion fades, only style remains.”
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, French, 1883-1971. Evening Dress and Slip, 1928, metal sequins on silk tulle. Dress, 1925, crystal beads on lace, silk ribbon. Dress, 1925, crystal beads on silk chiffon.Phoenix Art Museum Fashion Collection. Gifts of Mrs. Wesson Seyburn.
4. “Elegance is refusal.”
5. “It’s always better to be slightly underdressed.”
6. “Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, French, 1883-1971. Dress and Jacket, 1960s, wool tweed with brass lion’s head buttons. Gift of Mrs. Nathan Cummings. And Jacket, Skirt and Blouse, 1959-1960, wool boucle and silk. Gift of Mrs. Peggy K. Colbentz. Phoenix Art Museum Fashion Collection.
7. “Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.”
8. “There is time for work, and time for love. That leaves no other time”
9. “Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.”
10. “Anyone can be the duchess of Westminster, but there is only one Chanel.” (It remains a mystery whether or not the Duke of Westminster ever proposed to Chanel; it was beside the point for her.)
Perhaps it’s not that unusual to exhibit courage in the course of finding our métier. In becoming an attorney, a professor, a web designer, a hair stylist, there are challenges that must be met, doors through which you must step to get to the next level. There are crossroads, required leaps of faith, and moments when you need a new idea (jersey!), and thin air is the place you’re forced to look for it.
But Chanel was fearless on another front. For the length of her long life, she said what she thought. In case this doesn’t strike you as such a huge achievement, consider the cottage industry of best-selling books about the apparent inability of women to speak up, to negotiate, to press on with their ideas when they feel they’re not being heard. “The Daily Asker” is a popular blog, wherein the blogger has set herself the goal of asking for something every day. Yes, women can cry and women can rage, but even now, we still struggle with just saying what’ son her minds.
Chanel was not just a straight talker, she was a back talker, a woman who embraced her own churlishness. One of the cares she lost when she decided to be someone and not something was that of talking around her real thoughts and feelings, so as not to offend. Really, she couldn’t give a damn. Bring it on.
Stendhal (author of The Red and the Black and also ahead of his time) famously observed that the way to offend a Parisian was to call her kind. On this front there is no chance of offending Mademoiselle Chanel. She could be ruthless in her honesty and often downright mean. Unlike most American women she was never tempted to channel her inner, crowd-pleasing Labrador retriever. While she was a masterful flirt, she never felt the need to be kittenish in order to compensate for her wealth and fame.
Once, during the end of the 1920s when Chanel was the queen of Paris chic, after she’d created the famous black dress and after the massive L’Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, where rival Paul Poiret had torpedoed what was left of his brilliant and erratic career by showing opulent, floor-length gowns in silver, lamé, velvet taffeta, and chiffon, totally missing the “modern” aspect of the exposition, Chanel ran into him on the sidewalk. Poor Poiret had not just fallen out of favor, his finances were also in ruins. In addition to the expensive, out-of-style gowns he’d just shown at the Expo, he’d insisted on exhibiting them on a trio of electrically lit river barges, which cost the moon. Before this, in an effort to shore up his reputation and combat Chanel’s stubborn devotion to plainness, he even created dresses lit from the inside with tiny bulbs. At the risk of sounding Seusssian: He was down, she was up. He was over, she was on top. When she met him that day on the sidewalk, it would have been nothing for her to have been gracious.
Seeing Chanel in her little black suit with white schoolgirl collar and cuffs, Poiret said sarcastically, “What are you in mourning for, Mademoiselle?”
She said, “For you, dear Monsieur.”
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Chanel’s wit was not gentle but combative; she was Dorothy Parker with a pair of shears. She sneered at the husbands of her clients and said, “Those grand dukes were all the same. They were tall and handsome and splendid, but behind it all—nothing; just vodka and the void.”
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Chanel’s wit was not gentle but combative; she was Dorothy Parker with a pair of shears. Aside form her basic French disinclination to be agreeable, and her Cinderella complex, she bore the indignity of being a mere dressmaker. Even as she was becoming a success, when her hats were being worn exclusively by major actresses and she expanded her business to include both Biarritz and Paris (by 1917 she had five workrooms; in one workroom sixty seamstresses worked on clothes for Spain alone), she was routinely snubbed by the aristocratic women who were paying astronomical amounts for her clothes. They would spend hours having a fitting at her shop, then the next day pretend she was invisible when they ran into her at the races. This wasn’t unusual. Couturiers were considered tradespeople, no better than cabinetmakers and knife sharpeners. Charles Worth, the so-called father of haute couture, would cross the street when he saw a client, so as not to put her in the position of having to ignore him.
Then came Chanel with her neat, fresh clothes and her disinclination to take crap from anyone. She was charming, but she refused to censor herself. She sneered at the husbands of her clients and said, “Those grand dukes were all the same. They were tall and handsome and splendid, but behind it all—nothing; just vodka and the void.” Of the increasingly zaftig Colette she said, ”Colette preferred two grilled sausages to love.” She called Picasso “that Spaniard, with his hat.”
The result of all this mouthing off was not what you might expect. Rather than driving people away, Chanel’s devotion to thinking for herself, aloud, drew them to her, made her intriguing. She simply did not have the time, the energy, nor the inclination to care what anyone thought of her. Life was serious. She was serious. She defined luxury as liberty, and stopping to censor herself, to make herself pleasing to others, would be depriving her of luxury. Until she was a very old and very cantankerous old lady, Chanel was beloved. Axel Madsen closes his superb biography of Chanel with a kind, malice-free remark by the sausage-loving Colette, “It is in the secret of her work that we must find this thoughtful conqueror.”
Am I suggesting then that we err on the side of being a big ol’ bitch (or in this case a tiny, chic bitch)? Yes I am.
When we left young Coco Chanel, she had established herself first as a successful hat designer and then opened a trendy little shop in the resort town of Deauville, selling her little skirts and cardigans. But she had not yet become the great Mademoiselle Chanel, independent of her boyfriends’ support. She needed a Great Idea. Here, in our second excerpt from Karen Karbo’s new book, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, she finds it. (The photos are stills from the new movie Coco Before Chanel.)
Most of us, when we land upon a great idea, a lifesaving idea, immediately turn it into our baby. And like our real-life babies, we only want the best for it. We love it. We coddle it. It’s our great idea, and who knows when we might have another one! We want to implement it at the right time with the best materials possible. We want the stars to be right.
But Chanel’s chutzpah dictated the opposite. She was going to reinvent the female wardrobe, and she was going to do it now with whatever was at hand. And what was at hand was jersey, then thought of as the cheesiest material possible.
If the world of fabric was high school, jersey was the personality-free, nearly invisible nerd everyone avoided at lunch. Stretchy, clingy, and cheap, it came in colors like beige, medium beige, light beige, and lighter beige. It was the opposite of silk, wool, cashmere, tulle, and other fine fabrics that could, at the very least, hold their own shape.
How did Chanel decide to use this red-headed stepchild of fabrics? The Chanelore differs. Either she got a sensational deal on a lot of jersey from a manufacturer that decided against using it for the menswear for which it was originally made, or else her lease at the Rue Cambon stipulated that she could only make hats, because there was another dressmaker on the block. As jersey was not something used to make women’s clothes, Chanel’s early jackets, skirts, and suits were not considered clothing, and therefore did not violate the terms of her lease (I will not attempt to parse the French bureaucratic logic).
If things hadn’t worked out so well, Chanel could have easily been dismissed as a whack-a-doo, and her jersey ensembles written off as the crocheted beer hats of the early twentieth century or the disposable paper minidresses in style for a nanosecond during the 1960s.
But Chanel possessed an unswerving faith in her instincts, which included what she believed to be her impeccable taste. And it was (largely) impeccable, because she believed it was. It was sheer nerve. When she launched her line that summer before the war, her dressmaking skills were nearly nonexistent. She knew how to make hats, and she knew how to explain what she wanted to other people (i.e., the women she hired who did have actual dressmaking skills).
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The history of haute couture is populated with designers who were either born in a box by the side of the road, or like Chanel, suffered traumas straight out of Dickens. For every high-born Miuccia Prada, there is an Armani, who grew up in a small town near Milan that was so aggressively bombed by the allies during World War II that Giorgio lost his entire gang of boyfriends in a single day.
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It’s possible Chanel’s pluck was not as unique as it seems. The history of haute couture and luxury goods is populated with designers who were either born in a box by the side of the road, or like Chanel, suffered traumas straight out of Dickens. For every high-born Miuccia Prada and Pucci, there is an Armani, who grew up in a small town near Milan that was so aggressively bombed by the allies during World War II that Giorgio lost his entire gang of boyfriends in a single day. On another day, a rifle cartridge he’d found in the street exploded as he was leaning down to have a look. He spent forty days on the burn ward and still bears the scars. Chanel’s contemporary, Madeleine Vionnet, “queen of the bias cut,” was born dirt poor in Chilleurs-aux-Bois, Loiret. Her family sent her to begin her apprenticeship as a seamstress at age eleven; by eighteen she had already been married and divorced and was working in a London hospital as a seamstress, repairing tattered bedding. Louis Vuitton came from a family of farmers in the foothills of the French Alps; he left home at age thirteen for Paris and worked as a stable boy until he was able to apprentice himself to a trunk maker. In 1854, with nothing more than his good ideas as to how a fine trunk should be built, he opened his first shop on the Rue des Capucines. Thierry Hermès was orphaned at fifteen, after his parents and siblings died of various diseases during the Napoleonic Wars. He wandered a bit before settling in Normandy, the heart of French horse country, where he learned to make harnesses. In 1837 he opened his own shop in Paris (not far from Vuitton’s) and proceeded to make the most exquisite harnesses, saddles, and eventually, yes, handbags, on Earth.
It’s tempting to think that the gene for the courage to impose one’s vision of beauty on the world is located on the chromosome that also determines the ability to create a simple, beautiful object (a bag, a hat, a dress) for which people the world over will pay staggering amounts of money.
Chanel’s biographers have surmised that she was able to stick her neck out the way she did because she had nothing to lose, meaning she had no family, no husband, no name, and no money. The other thing she had was no wiggle room. Had her business tanked, she would have lost the patronage of Balsan and Capel, both of whom had absolutely no obligation to underwrite her or her shop. Unlike Blanche Dubois, she was not relying on the kindness of strangers, but on the kindness of businessmen, a far riskier proposition.
The moral of the “Using Jersey When Good Sense Would Dictate Using Wool or Something More Sensible” story is twofold. First, when it comes to going with your gut and making the big, bold, seemingly outlandish move, doing so from a precarious position in life is not just a good idea, it’s the best idea. The very precariousness can, in fact, be a source of strength. Chanel wasn’t about to wait to launch her big idea; on the eve of war, in a relative backwater town (Deauville was chic, but it was hardly Paris), modern fashion was born.
In The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman, Karen Karbo (interviewed here) tells the story of one of the 20th century’s great innovators: the woman who, among other things, popularized the little black dress, made costume jewelry respectable, developed the first deliberately abstract and artificial perfume, and turned jersey and cardigans into women's wardrobe staples. Coco Chanel's greatest invention, the one that made the others possible, was herself. Here, illustrated with video from the newly released movie Coco Before Chanel (the date is British; the film is just now opening in the U.S.), is the first of three excerpts from the chapter titled “On Fearlessness.”
From the perspective of someone who is able to overcome her fears only sporadically through a combination of deep yogic breathing and self-talk, the strong, unrelenting heartbeat of Chanel’s courage alone is enough to qualify her for beatification, St. Coco, Patron Saint of Jersey (the fabric, not the island).
After Chanel realized she could more or less single-handedly (let’s not forget her assistants—she could not have done what she did without the little people) overthrow the institution of the twenty-pound platter hat with her saucy department-store boaters, she decided she could do the same for all of women’s fashion. Pourquois pas? Why not? It was the same principle, only on a larger scale. She was like a warrior queen who invaded a little country as practice for attacking a larger one.
It was the summer of 1914, the uneasy first summer of the first World War, and everyone who could fled Paris for Deauville, a posh resort on the northeastern coast of France, known for its racetrack, Grand Casino, and grand hotels. Chanel (with the backing of her new lover, Boy Capel) opened Chanel Modes on the main drag between the most luxurious hotel in town and the Grand Casino, and there she started selling little skirts and fetching cardigans.
A lucky heat wave in July, and that being-on-holiday-so-what-the-hell feeling that in our times manifests itself as a willingness to stop at the market on the way home from the beach in a sarong, sent fashionable society ladies (with fabulous rich-lady names like Princess Baba de Faucigny-Lucinge and Pauline de Saint-Saveur) into Coco’s shop for her light, comfy pieces, which would soon be known as sportswear, even though the only “sport” women engaged in them was the occasional slow bike ride, promenading between shops and motoring.
The creation of the fetching cardigan has its own equally fetching Chanelore behind it. One day Chanel was tromping around the barn/at the races or strolling along the beach and asked to borrow boyfriend Capel’s pullover. This was the kind of relationship they had, intimate and chummy. She could ask to borrow his clothes and Capel, an iconoclast in his own right, thought nothing of it. But the pullover...what a nuisance to haul this thing over her head—one presumes she had to remove her nervy little straw boater first—and so she simply took a pair of scissors, cut the pullover up the middle, belted it, and Bob’s your uncle. How the shears and belt miraculously appeared at the barn/track/shore is one of those charming Chanelian mysteries that we faithful simply accept. It supports the observation of her friend Paul Morand (novelist, diplomat, modernist, friend of Proust) that she “built her wardrobe in response to her needs, just the way Robinson Crusoe built his hut.”
It took pluck to introduce easy-to-wear clothes during an era when “clothes” and “easy-to-wear” had never yet appeared together in a sentence. At the end of the Belle Époque, the S-bend corset was out, but the long-line corset, looser laced but extending to the knees (!) for a slimming effect, was in, and women’s clothes were still a cross between costume and armor. Ladies dressed every morning in a woman disguise, in clothes designed to aggressively suggest femininity while at the same time hiding the female shape lurking beneath.
So Chanel, the young milliner who still scrubbed with the same no-nonsense soap the nuns used at the orphanage, with one cheeky, well-received concept under her belt (simplify!), decided to expand. She decided rather than disguising women as women, it was time to create clothes that allowed the ladies to work it.
Historians differ on how she came to take this giant step forward. Some say she was innocently putting one delicate foot in front of the other, and moving from hats into clothing was the next obvious thing; others believe she was a crafty businesswoman with a master plan hatched—I’m guessing—during all those idle hours at Royallieu while she was helping Étienne Balsan’s grooms tend the thoroughbreds (as anyone who has horses in her life knows, for every hour in the saddle there are hours and hours of cooling down, bathing, brushing, hoof picking, etc.). I’ve decided to believe the latter, that she was a crafty faux Auvergnate bent on conquering the world in her own way, as opposed to a darling wee thing that simply fell into monumental, world-changing success.
Anyway, it was her big idea at a time when she needed a big idea. Chanel always looked young and passed herself off as younger. If she could have continued to pass herself off as eighteen indefinitely, she would have. In 1914 she was thirty-one, a few years past the age when women who were neither wives nor mothers were written off as “redundant.” In this way things haven’t changed much. Or rather they changed about forty years ago, when it was thought that a woman needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle, and then they changed back. To be thirty-one and unmarried is the same tragedy now as it was a hundred years go, back in the days when driving was considered a sport. At any rate, Chanel’s fate wasn’t yet guaranteed. Just because she had a successful hat business, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be thrown over by Capel (as she eventually was) and left husband-less, family-less, penniless.
This famous photograph by Howell Conant recently sold at auction for $2,400. It originally ran on the cover of Collier’s in June 1955 and helped establish Grace Kelly as an exemplar of a new style of “natural glamour,” a graceful, elegant sexiness without the obvious artifice of the Golden Age studio photographers like Clarence Bull and George Hurrell.
From Botticelli’s Venus to Ursula Andress in Dr. No, the beautiful woman rising from the sea is an alluring archetype. This photo adds an element of mystery, concealing the body below the surface of the water. The bare shoulders suggest nudity, but her swimsuit is in fact just visible.
In Life: Remembering Grace, a collection of Conant's photographs, Kay and Digby Diehl write that the photographer and star together “broke the mold of the traditional movie star ‘glamour’ photograph....We feel we are seeing the candid, unguarded ‘everyday' Grace, unassisted by hairdressers or makeup artists. The natural glamour of this 25-year-old woman is both timeless and seductive.”
Despite the absence of stylists, however, that glamour is not as effortless as it appears. (Glamour never is.) Though it may seem spontaneous, the photograph is carefully composed. The bathing suit’s straps have been removed to showcase those shoulders. The lighting is not entirely natural; Kelly’s sister Peggy held a light reflector. Both photographer and subject (and presumably Peggy as well) had to stand carefully on tiptoes to avoid the spiny sea urchins on the sea floor. And the pose wasn’t casual. To disguise her square jaw, Conant avoided shooting Grace facing the camera straight on. She posed first with a scuba mask but, after many shots, he decided it concealed too much of her face. He then took eight different shots of her before achieving this one.
This Art Deco brooch, on sale at deja-voodoo.com, represents a classic image of streamlined glamour: the sleek modern woman and her sleek modern whippet. The motif was all over the place in the 1920s. Here's another brooch, which may have been given away as a a premium to Vogue subscribers. In the much-reproduced Symphony in Black, Erte luxed up the pair with diamonds and furs, while sculptor Edward McCartan's 1923 Diana was nude. “A long-limbed, yuppie-slim version of the goddess Diana, she strides along, reining in a pure-bred whippet who strains suggestively at his leash,” the NYT's Grace Gleuck wrote of the sculpture, reviewing a 1997 Met exhibit.
Whippets are ideal for stylized images, because they are stylized creatures, bred for speed. Over short distances, they can reach 37 miles an hour. The breeder's artifice also produces some characteristics you you don't see in the glamorized images. Two of my brothers have whippets, including the dog in the photo. They are sweet, well-behaved dogs. But standing still or walking across a living room floor, whippets look pretty peculiar, with their hunched backs, rib-revealing torsos, and tippy-toe stance. They also shiver in the cold. (The jacket in the photo is functional, not decorative.) If you didn't know better, you might think they were malnourished. Once they set off running, however, their grace returns and you see why they became early 20th-century symbols of speed.
Naomi Wolf's Harper's Bazaaressay on Angelina Jolie has attracted contemptuous comment. “An absurd, overwrought, swooning love letter,” Willa Paskin called it on DoubleX. Paskin’s disgust recalls Ron Rosenbaum’s condemnation of Tom Junod’s 2007 Esquire profile of the actress, which worked a strained and inappropriate post-9/11 angle.
Unlike Paskin, I do not regard Wolf as “a serious feminist and thinker.” She’s a feminist, certainly, but neither serious nor a thinker. She is an emoter, whose work typically generalizes from her narcissistic neediness to “the female experience.” It is usually an intellectually frivolous approach.
But this time it works brilliantly, though not in the way Wolf intends. In her love letter to Jolie, Wolf has provided one of the most revealing accounts of movie-star glamour since Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. While Stacey, a genuinely serious feminist scholar, surveyed a large group of British women about their recollections of stars and moviegoing in the ’30s and ’40s, Wolf provides her own one-woman focus group. Her article demonstrates how glamour works by letting us inside the mind of someone as she projects her own longings onto a glamorous icon.
The magic of Jolie’s self-presentation? She makes the claim, with her life and actions, that, indeed, you can get away with it. All of it. Against every Western convention, she has managed to draw together all of these kinds of female liberation and empowerment. And her gestures determinedly transgress social boundaries — boundaries of convention, race, class, and gender — giving many of us a vicarious thrill.
This portrait of Marilyn Monroe posing as Jackie Kennedy is from what's known as “The Lost Sitting,” because these transparencies from Monroe's final photo sessions (“The Last Sitting”) with Bert Stern were missing for decades. A portfolio of prints from the session is up for auction next week.
Despite the signature dark wig, it’s striking how little Monroe looks like Kennedy. With her barely parted mouth, off-the-shoulder blouse, and possibly sprawled (though concealed) legs, she not surprisingly appears more sexually suggestive than the first lady. Again not surprisingly, she’s also more vulnerable, and childlike. And she’s sweeter, a characteristic that points up an essential contrast between the glamour of these two icons. Jackie may have spoken in a similarly breathy whisper, but she carried herself like a steely aristocrat. Here, the clothes are less like armor, the abundant pearls less restrained (and more obviously faux), the hands unconcealed by gloves, the body language more open. Monroe was not just a sex symbol but a comedienne whose screen persona appealed to women as well as men.
“The image is not and never was intended to portray the Virgin of Guadalupe or any other religious figure. The intent was to reflect a Renaissance-like mood on the cover," said the magazine. Right.
One Renaissance figure might find the sexy image all too familiar: Savonarola, the fiery Florentine Dominican who inspired the original (or at least most famous) bonfire of the vanities. In a 1496 Lenten sermon, he denounced Florentine artists, and their patrons, for the way they portrayed holy figures:
“You painters do harm, and if you knew the resulting scandal you wouldn’t paint figures such as these, filling our churches with human vanity. Do you really think the Virgin Mary went around dressed as you depict her? I assure you she dressed like a poor girl, simply and modestly, and was so well-covered that all you could see were her eyes....”
“You would do everyone a favor if you wiped out the suggestive figures you have painted: you show the Virgin Mary dressed as if she were a prostitute!”
“If there were two characters I wanted to be during the sixties, they were Mr. Spock—and James Bond. The relationship is quite logical. Both displayed total self-confidence and amazing problem-solving skills. Both traveled to exotic locales, surviving any number of deadly perils. Both were irresistible to women. And both shared a quality that my generation lacked completely: composure. Bond, of course, had his weaknesses; his tackle rattled like a crib toy at the sight of a well-filled bikini. But Mr. Spock was virtually unassailable. The most startling marvels in the cosmos were “fascinating.” Disasters were “unfortunate,” perhaps even “tragic.” The raised eyebrow, the vaguely sarcastic mien—these were coins of the realm to my circle of adolescent friends. How did we weather the terrors of grade school? We became Spock. How did we survive the irrational outbursts of our parents? By invoking Spock. Who served as our logical, enlightened counterpoint to the madness of the late 1960s? Who else, I say, but Spock?”
Dean Martin's relationship with fame and glamour was probably the most complicated of any 20th century figure. Read Nick Tosche's masterpiece, Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams if you don't believe me. About Martin's fabled cool:
Deep down, that, as much as anything, was what he was--a menefreghista--one who simply did not give a fuck.
So why then, did ad giant DDBO:New York think that a Dino look-alike can sell laminate flooring?
Using the tagline It Only Looks Like the Real Thing is a complete lie as none of the celebrity impersonators look like the stars. Maybe Younger, Happier and Still Alive would have been better.
Apartment Therapy has a reader who agrees with me, but some wacko in blogistan wants to see Sinatra, Elvis and Audrey Hepburn re-enactors in another series. Armstrong--Andate tutti a 'fanculo!
Before Goth became a mall-rat style choice, there was Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. In 1981, Cassandra Peterson hosted a syndicated horror movie TV show, and a cult favorite was born. Peterson, a member of the Groundlings improv troupe, combined sexiness, camp and a genuine enthusiasm for low-budget gore flicks.
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:
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, that life was particularly remote from the cold, depressing, make-and-mend Britain of the 1950s.
, Stephen Gundle likens cellophane to “striptease, which achieved its effect by constantly making the unveiled body more remote.”Wrapped in cellophane, “products were available but untouchable and therefore inaccessible.”
, which I reviewed along with the Gundle book 
, a graphic novel aimed at tweens, does both. And while the book, written by Sarah Stewart Taylor and drawn by Ben Towle, doesn't have enough plot to make a movie, it demonstrates that the way to portray Earhart is, in fact, to use a sympathetic protagonist who admires her. The graphic novel makes the wise choice to show us Earhart through the eyes of an admirer, a girl who lives in the seafaring community of Trepassy, Newfoundland, and aspires to be a newspaper reporter. Located on the far eastern edge of North America, Trepassy is the point from which Earhart and other aviation pioneers took off for Europe. It's also a shipwreck-strewn place whose name 
(DG interview 
, the 
. A less earnest director or more creative script might have produced a more interesting Amelia, one less reliant on half-hearted soap opera and more focused on the challenges of early aviation. But the real problem may be Amelia Earhart herself.
, the catalog for a 
. Virtue aside, virtuosity is clearly evidence of commitment and hard work. In his book 
Daniel Coyle describes how repeated, focused practice of specific skills causes the involved neural pathways to be insulated with myelin, ultimately making these pathways as much as 3,000 times more efficient. He repeats what I have read elsewhere, that the usual amount of deep practice necessary to master a difficult sport or musical instrument at a virtuoso level is roughly 10,000 hours or about 10 years. Getting 10,000 hours of practice in ten years would mean spending an average of 2.75 hours every day in deep, focused practice. To do it in fewer years would require more hours of practice each day. Whether we are discussing playing an instrument, playing soccer, skateboarding, or playing tennis, a huge investment of time is required to become a virtuoso player or performer.
and also ahead of his time) famously observed that the way to offend a Parisian was to call her kind. On this front there is no chance of offending Mademoiselle Chanel. She could be ruthless in her honesty and often downright mean. Unlike most American women she was never tempted to channel her inner, crowd-pleasing Labrador retriever. While she was a masterful flirt, she never felt the need to be kittenish in order to compensate for her wealth and fame.
of Chanel with a kind, malice-free remark by the sausage-loving Colette, “It is in the secret of her work that we must find this thoughtful conqueror.”
, a collection of Conant's photographs, Kay and Digby Diehl write that the photographer and star together “broke the mold of the traditional movie star ‘glamour’ photograph....We feel we are seeing the candid, unguarded ‘everyday' Grace, unassisted by hairdressers or makeup artists. The natural glamour of this 25-year-old woman is both timeless and seductive.”
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