Many women (including my wife) enthusiastically agree that actor Timothy Olyphant is incredibly hot. As Marshall Raylan Givens in FX channel’s Justified, he is as dangerous as a heart-throb as he is with a gun.
When portraying Marshall Givens in dangerous situations, Olyphant uses his eyes and sly smile to convey the feeling that Givens is coolly sizing up the opposition. Marshall Givens usually seems less prone to rage than the sheriff Olyphant played in Deadwood. Nonetheless, Olyphant makes us feel that Marshall Givens will kill without a moments hesitation, if justified. And since Justified is set in a contemporary rural Kentucky environment filled with dangerous criminals, guns, and drugs, Givens’s expertise with a handgun does frequently come into play.
A number of things seems to make Olyphant particularly attractive to women. He is tall and lean-muscled, with a body like a fashion model. He is boyishly handsome, with a lush head of hair. As Marshall Givens, Olyphant’s intense, dark-eyes sometimes narrow into threatening slits as he looks out from under his cowboy hat. But a sideways glance from those dark eyes, combined with a sly smile, seems to make many of his female fans go weak in the knees.
Olyphant has been talked about as one of the new male actors who have a notable flair with style. GQ magazine recently named his Raylan Givens character as the most stylish man on TV (their site has a great photo of Olyphant in costume). In a December 2011 GQ article Sarah Goldstein wrote that even some men have crushes on Marshall Givens. And Olyphant himself admits that he enjoys playing a badass character like Raylan.
When I e-mailed Scottish sculptor Kevin Dagg that my wife and I were thinking of visiting Scotland, he sent this recent photograph of himself hiking to encourage us to come. It worked, although we booked our visit for warmer weather in May and June.
This extraordinary location is the Munro (a mountain in Scotland over 3,000 feet high) Stob Ghahbar in Glen Orchy. Many Scottish peaks are connected by long ridges, and in this photo such a ridge disappears into the clouds.
When we encounter vast, wild beauty in nature, we are often struck by a sense of the sublime. In his History of BeautyUmberto Eco has a chapter on the sublime, and in it he quotes first century AD writer Psuedo-Longinus describing sublime beauty as:
something that enriches the thoughts, something that is hard, if not impossible to gainsay, something that leaves an enduring indelible memory.
According to Eco, Psuedo-Longinus is first writer to discuss the sublime, and in relationship to art he spoke of the sublime as the expression of grand and noble passions that brings “into play the emotional involvement of both the creator and the perceiver of the work of art.” Similarly, it is an ongoing theme of DeepGlamour that the responses of the perceiver are crucial to the perception of glamour, just as they are to the perception of the sublime.
Looking at this image I am also reminded that Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote that “You can never step into the same river twice.” This ridge has probably existed longer than humans, yet Kevin will never be able to experience it in exactly the same way again. He can hike here again, but the snow, the clouds, the weather, and Kevin himself will inevitably be slightly different. Sublime beauty in nature can sometimes evoke both a sense of nature as long-lasting, and an awareness that our experiences are brief glimpses of a transitory, ever-changing world.
[Photograph by Gareth Overton. Used by permission.]
Dmitri Tymoczko, a composer and theorist who teaches at Princeton, recently published a book titled A Geometry of Music. The book includes some remarkable geometric models (such as the one shown at right) which he uses to argue that despite various stylistic differences, there are enough commonalities in Western tonal music from the late Middle Ages to the present to consider it an “extended common practice.”
Tymoczko himself assumes that anyone who reads his book will already be able to read music and have studied music theory. And without that background his book would be impossible to follow. Interestingly, he recognizes that there is gap between our widespread ability to enjoy music, and the arcane intricacies of music notation and theory. Early in his book he writes:
I find it useful here to consider the analogy with magic. A stage magician uses various tricks to cause the audience to have extraordinary experiences—bunnies seem to disappear, beautiful assistants seem to be sawed in half, and so on. Enjoying a magic trick does not require you to understand how the tricks are done; in fact, understanding may actually diminish your astonishment. Nor is the magician’s “ideal audience” composed of professional magicians: the point is to perform the trick for people who will genuinely be fooled. In much the same way, I understand composition to be a process of using technical musical tools to ensure that audiences have certain kinds of extraordinary experiences. When composing, I make various choices about chords, scales, rhythm, and instrumentation to create feelings of tension, relaxation, terror, and ecstasy, to recall earlier moments in the piece or anticipate later events. But I do not expect listeners to be consciously tracking these choices.
Tymoczko goes on to suggest that consciously trying to track these choices may interfere with falling under the spell of the illusion, just as knowing too much about how a glamorous illusion has been achieved might weaken the illusion. Tymoczko writes that listeners who do try to track the specific means by which the illusions are achieved “are like professional magicians watching each others’ routines—at best, engaged in a different sort of appreciation, and at worst too intellectually engaged to enjoy the music as deeply as they might.”
Another mathematically gifted composer named Milton Babbitt taught at Princeton before Tymoczko, but his attitude was almost the opposite. In contrast to Tymoczko’s interest in listeners who are not “professionals,” Babbitt famously wrote that he didn’t expect laypeople to enjoy his complex music, saying that it was written for a specialist musical community analogous to the specialist community of professional mathematicians.
Tymoczko notes that it was not until the 20th century that some composers (such as Babbitt) began using musical materials in ways that they realized that most listeners find “off-putting.” Geoffrey Miller, in his book The Mating Mind, points out that such a strategy can be an effective way of generating an “elite aesthetic.” Miller writes that elites “often try to distinguish themselves from the common run of humanity by replacing natural human tastes with artfully contrived preferences.” Thus if the vast majority of people around the world prefer consonant sound combinations, then working primarily with dissonant combination is one possible way to separate your work from “common” tastes.
In contrast, Tymoczko asserts that the “traditional strategy—writing immediately attractive music that also contains deeper levels of structure—is as potent as it ever was.” Not surprisingly, composers following the traditional strategy have often been relatively close-mouthed about their techniques. After all, if one of your intents is create works that might cause non-professional audiences to have extraordinary, spell-binding experiences, why would you risk diluting that experience with cold-blooded discussions of esoteric techniques? In contrast, composers keen on impressing other specialists have often taken an active part in pointing out the intricacies of their technical innovations.
Like Tymoczko, I prefer that creative artists, like magicians, use their technical tools to help audiences have extraordinary experiences, and then maintain some measure of mystery about how they managed to fashion their magic spells. Let some sense of magic remain. If I want to know more about their techniques, I can always buy and study the score. But when I attend a performance, I am hoping to be beguiled.
The yoga-pants crowd is apparently huffing and puffing (mindfully, I imagine) over the "Who Is John Galt?" shopping bags being handed out at Lululemon. (There's a good photo, with both sides of the bag, at the bottom of this blog post.)
“Galt would not likely have proclaimed, as Lululemon’s bags once did, that 'what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves,'” notes the NYT's Ian Austen--a deadpan understatement that demonstrates just how often (the right kind of) politics goes unnoted on shopping bags.
But, he reports, the company's website relates Ayn Rand's celebration of excellence to the company's philosophy: “Our bags are visual reminders for ourselves to live a life we love and conquer the epidemic of mediocrity. We all have a John Galt inside of us, cheering us on. How are we going to live lives we love?”
Or, as Molly Worthen writes on Slate, “Yoga and Rand have both spawned subcultures of devotees not because Americans are either pantheistic mystics or objectivists but because they are individualists who belong to the church of self-improvement.”
Worthen's observation is borne out by another Rand sighting, this one in Bloomingdale's (click photo for larger view), where a Rand quote appears alongside similarly inspirational lines from Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Diana Vreeland, Betty Friedan, and Raquel Welch: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark....The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” Oprah couldn't have said it better.
[Photo by Virginia Postrel. You are free to use it with a link back to this post.]
To celebrate Black Friday, our friends at Electra Lang, interviewed in the post below, are offering DG readers a chance to win one of their modern classics: the Darcy shirt, with its flattering Edwardian collar and adjustable length.
Don't worry, you don't have to show up at 6 a.m. and fight the madding crowds. To enter, just leave a comment below before midnight Pacific Time on Friday, December 9.
The winner will be picked using Random.org. Contest open to U.S. residents only. Pattern and color of shirt will depend on availability. DG reserves the right to delete comments deemed to be commercial spam.
Most women of a certain age, especially those who've had a few kids, face a fashion dilemma: how to look chic and stylish without veering either into youthful indiscretion (Forever 21 doesn't mean you really are) or what the founders of the Electra Lang clothing line call the "Bea Arthur" or "Stevie Nicks" pitfalls. The Los Angeles-based company arose from experience, after Laura Collins (above, middle) discovered that the only way to find clothes that fit and flattered was to design them herself. She teamed up with Electra Lang and Kristi Buckley to turn that inspiration into a line of dresses and tunics with a casual yet polished vibe. Selling primarily online, the first Electra Lang collection launched in May 2011, with an expanded line planned for Spring/Summer 2012, beginning in February. The partners talked with DG about designing clothes "with an actual human body in mind."
Come back on Black Friday for a special giveaway contest from Electra Lang.
DG: Who's your customer?
EL: Our customer wants clothing that she doesn’t need to think about—she can be comfortable and look stylish, but not be a slave to fashion. We thought a lot about what works for most people’s bodies and we came up with Electra Lang’s Manifesto: “The Proper Principles of a Perfect Piece”
Chic Simple to wear Versatile Enough coverage Comfortable Lined Reasonably priced Easy to buy Voila…. Electra Lang Clothing was born.
DG: You talk about "dressing with style but with some propriety too." What do you mean?
Too often, we find tops that aren’t long enough, hemlines too short on dresses, lack of much-wanted sleeves, transparent fabrics with no lining, and jersey that clings too much. We designed our clothing to be fun and beautiful, but still cover all the right not-so-beautiful spots.
DG: You use a lot of interesting print fabrics. What do you look for in selecting prints?
One of our favorite parts of the design process is choosing our fabrics. We work with designers who create some of the freshest, most beautiful prints: they need to be sophisticated, yet playful prints. Sometimes a garment is more about distraction and camouflage, and certain prints can provide that, but for us to use them, they have to be glamorous as well.
DG: What's the problem with relying on a body form, or fit mannequin, to develop new designs?
One of the first things we did as designers was to get rid of the mannequin and fit everything on a real human body! Mannequins, unlike humans, look amazing in everything! That’s how we solved the mystery of why so many garments in the marketplace don’t fit well, or seem ill-conceived (a bunch of men in a back room dressing up a giant doll). Our designs are created with an actual human body in mind!
DG: Aside from buying clothes from Electra Lang, how would you advise women to avoid the "Stevie Nicks" and "Bea Arthur" looks?
As women get older, the balance between femininity, fashion, and fit becomes rather tricky. Too many wispy, lacy ruffles become rather theatrical and circuslike—in a bad way. On the other hand, manly pantsuits with long vests or wraps definitely set off the Bea Arthur alarm. Feeling comfortable in your own skin and clothes is what makes you attractive and sexy. If you look good without trying too hard, that says volumes about your style. Electra Lang balances great fashion with comfortable designs.
DG: How do you make your garments adjustable?
We are always working to improve the fit of our pieces. In every piece, whether there is an “adjustable” element or not, we make sure that it has flexibility. Our new silk jersey dress has stretch, but is carefully designed not to cling where it shouldn’t and to flow where it should. Our tunics are designed to camouflage a belly, but are adjustable in the back to create a flattering silhouette.
DG: What have you learned about the garment business in L.A.?
We decided from the beginning to do all of our production here in Los Angeles. This allowed us to control and monitor every aspect of the production, so that our designs were as close to our specs as possible. We also, want to be able to respond quickly to the market and we can’t do that with the long lead times required when manufacturing abroad. Plus, we love our city and want to do our part in keeping jobs here in Los Angeles.
1) How do you define glamour? Glamour is confidence, a personal style that looks put together and shows some thought behind it.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon? Katherine Hepburn—she had a signature style that was sometimes adventurous, but she always embodied ease and confidence.
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity? For a woman, glamour is a necessity, it is part and parcel of being a woman. It’s not just about fashion, it’s how you present yourself, how you entertain, how you care for others and, ultimately, reflects how you feel. Even if you weren’t born with it, it is something that you can cultivate.
[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 don't follow Dancing with the Stars, so when I saw J.R. Martinez on the cover of last week's People I didn't realize he'd been in the news lately.
Isn't that the guy Charles Oliver wrote about for DeepGlamour? I asked myself. And, sure enough, it was. For those of you who missed it, here, straight from J.R.'s hometown of Dalton, Georgia, is that 2008 guest post about how an injured veteran turned himself into a soap opera actor.
Jewelry designer Sandy Leong has lived in Manhattan for nearly two decades, but she still exudes the fit, outdoorsy vibe of her native Pacific Coast (Portland to Anchorage to San Francisco as a child). So it's not surprising that she brings a combination of urban refinement and subtly organic shapes to her line of jewelry--a business that grew from a hobby she developed while looking for a creative outlet once her kids were in school. Now her designs are turning up on such stylish celebrities as Fergie and Gabrielle Union and in the pages of magazines including O, Lucky, and People. (Having followed Sandy's business, I was excited when, during an American Airlines upgrade, I spotted some of her teardrop earrings in the pages of Celebrated Living, American's magazine for its first-class cabin.) Sandy shared her thoughts on the glamour of jewelry, building a luxury business in tough times, and why she believes in gold.
DG: What's the appeal of jewelry?
Sandy Leong: “The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.” My favorite line from Steel Magnolias. And I think that really applies to the appeal of jewelry. Along with shoes, it really has the biggest impact on your outfit.
DG: How did you get interested in designing jewelry? How did you learn jewelry design?
SL: When both my children were in school full time, I found myself wondering what I used to do before I had kids? A girlfriend and I both received the 92 Street Y catalog and decided to pick a class that we could both take together. It turned out to be Jewelry for Beginners. That was nine years ago and from the first time I held a soldering torch, I was hooked. I’ve been taking classes there continuously and have also taken classes at the Jewelry Arts Institute in NYC.
DG: How would you describe your design aesthetic?
SL: It’s easy, simple, modern, and timeless. You can wear my pieces during the day to pick up the kids from school, go grocery shopping and not feel overdressed, but can also wear it out to dinner and evening functions and it adds just the right of amount sparkle and pizzazz. It’s all made here in the U.S. with recycled 18k gold, too!
Although most pieces have a very organic feel in nature, I am also extremely influenced by the cut of my stones and the architectural style that surrounds the stone.
DG: Why do you work in gold as opposed, say, to both gold and silver?
SL: Gold has a very luxurious feel to it. I wanted my jewelry to be timeless investment pieces that would hold their value over time, whether sentimentally or financially. When using 18k gold, the finish doesn’t tarnish and with care, will look and feel exactly like the day you bought it.
DG: Who is your customer?
SL: My customer is a successful woman who has her own money and is not afraid to spend it. She knows quality, is a trend setter, rather than a follower, and loves luxury and beautiful pieces. She’s active, athletic and can’t be bothered to change her jewelry for every event throughout her busy day. She wears her jewelry, but the jewelry doesn’t wear her.
Gabrielle Union in an architectural square-cut ring
DG: What's the most difficult challenge you've faced as a new jewelry designer?
SL: The economy is a huge challenge! I launched my line in 2008 when conspicuous consumption was out of fashion. However, my customer is back and more cautious about making wise investments instead of trendy fads that come and go with the season. Also, most major department stores are consignment based and the financial outlay is tremendous for a jewelry designer trying to make retail presence and with limited resources.
DG: Jewelry seems like a very competitive industry. How do you stand out?
SL: Perseverance. So many times it seems it would be so much easier to just throw in the towel, but I have a point of view and the response has been so positive. I design each and every piece for myself. If I wear it, I know I have a customer that will too. I have a growing and rabid following, who swear they wear their Sandy Leong earrings, rings, necklaces, etc. every day. That is exactly how I intended my jewelry to be worn. I have a necklace that is a little 18k dewdrop on a very delicate chain that I wear every day, with everything. And I never leave the house without an easy pair of earrings like these.
DG: Aside from your own designs, what are some of your favorite pieces of jewelry, either ones that you own yourself or ones that you've seen?
SL: I’m currently obsessed with my husband’s Rolex Oyster Perpetual Date. I had links taken out of so it fit my wrist. It’s a nice complement to my more feminine pieces.
The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour? Glamour begins with self-confidence. It’s an effortless way of being. Whether you’re wearing jeans and a t-shirt or a fabulous ball gown, it’s all about your attitude.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon? Elizabeth Taylor, the early years, and Kate Middleton
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity? Glamour is a necessity. It’s the allure of the excitement and adventure that makes life worth living.
4) Favorite glamorous movie? Breakfast at Tiffany’s
6) Favorite glamorous object (car, accessory, electronic gadget, etc.)? Right now? My black Hermes Birkin bag! I feel glamorous just holding it.
7) Most glamorous place? Capri, Italy
8) Most glamorous job? 1960s American Airlines Flight Attendant
[9 and 10 skipped]
11) Can glamour survive? Of course it will. Where would we be without it? Everyone can use a little bit a glamour and magic in their life.
12) Is glamour something you're born with? I would say no, but my daughter who is 15 was born with it. She has an amazing sense of style and has so much self confidence that she’s been turning heads since she was a baby. She can command a room and I don’t know how I could teach that.
In an article for History Today, Carol Dyhouse, the author of Glamour: Women, History, Feminism, chronicles the rise and fall of different sorts of fur as the symbols of feminine luxury, particularly in Britain. Particularly interesting is the way mink suddenly replaced fox after World War II:
Instead mink became the fur most coveted by women. J.G. Links, son of the furrier Calman Links, mused on the fickleness of fashion in this respect. Gone were the days ‘when a hundred thousand silver foxes alone would be offered for sale and eagerly competed for in one London auction alone’, he wrote. Red fox was now deemed just about unsaleable and he found it incredible ‘that a Kamchatka red fox, with its deep golden-red colouring like a Turner sunset, and its caressing, sensuous fur, should today find no buyers at fewer shillings than I used to pay pounds for it’. By the 1950s Links estimated that sales of mink were worth three to four times as much in money terms as all other furs put together. Some six million mink were being ‘produced’ annually by this time.
Now, of course, the market for mink has all but collapsed. When my mother-in-law asked about possibly selling her own mother's mink stole on eBay a few years ago, I had to break the news that it was worth less than $200 (probably considerably less, judging from current listings). People often assume that has something to do with the animal rights movement, but Dyhouse suggests the shift is less about ideology and more about pure fashion.
Fur was falling from favour well before the activism of the 1980s. In the late 1950s the price of mink fell dramatically. The cost of manufacturing a mink coat now exceeded that of the raw materials and there were many in the trade who felt that the luxury status of fur was becoming a thing of the past. Demand began to fall. The widespread adoption of central heating no doubt played some part: in bitter cold, nothing keeps you warm like natural fur. But the truth was that the fur coat, once the epitome of glamour and luxury, acquired unfashionable connotations from the 1960s. It signified an older, less trendy and more dependent kind of femininity. The urbane and discreet Links had insisted that most furs were bought by husbands for their wives and not for their mistresses. But in the popular mind the fur coat had come to signify hussies on the make or the kept woman.
This had little appeal for the young woman of the 1960s. When she rose to television fame as a popular singer in the 1950s, Alma Cogan had celebrated by buying two silver blue mink coats, one for herself and the other for her mother. She had offered to buy one for her younger sister, Sandra, too, but Sandra had demurred. She wanted to be seen as a serious actress ‘and a sort of beatnik’, she recorded, and she insisted on a duffel coat instead. Fur was a dying trend. Fur coats, once lovingly consigned to ‘cold storage’ facilities in department stores in summer, went to the back of the wardrobe instead. Many found their way to flea-markets or car-boot sales in the new millennium.
In the U.S. at least, I don't think furs signified hussies or kept women, but they definitely signified a doting man, rather than means of your own. Mad Men played with this in Don Draper's early ad, starring Betty, with its caption, "Why Wait for a Man to Buy You a Fur Coat?"
These days when airlines try to sell their services with glamour, they usually wind up looking ridiculous, because the real-world experience bears no resemblance to the advertised ease. We hate to fly, and it shows.
But a new ad for British Airways pulls it off--not by promising passengers a glamorous experience but by evoking the enduringly glamorous archetype of the aviator.
Recently I sat in a rental house on the Oregon coast watching the sun set on the Pacific in a magical array of oranges and blues. Adding to the magical aura was a girl of about 15 whom I had first noticed as we were driving back to catch the sunset. She had been running along the road in long easy strides, wearing her track-team colors.
Now, as the sun dropped to the horizon, she was sprinting up the hill on the road beside the house. Shortly past the house she turned and slowly jogged down, taking short, prancing steps to let her heart rate slow down. At the bottom of the hill she turned in a tight circle and once again sprinted up the hill in long powerful strides. I stopped counting after the eighth sprint of her solitary routine.
There was something immensely satisfying about watching this impressive display of self-discipline. Perhaps, thanks to Title IX, she hopes to compete in track all the way through college, maybe even on a scholarship. Perhaps she just loves to run, and running itself provides some kind of harmony and order to her daily routine, perhaps even to her life.
In any case, I was grateful to her for adding to the magic of a September evening. Her routine seemed nothing like some Sisyphean ordeal. Instead, watching her reminded me of seeing the exuberant exertions of a young animal discovering the physical power of its body and simply exulting in feeling that power in motion. I had felt much the same pleasure watching two small children run with their dogs on the beach that morning.
To observe someone exulting in the moment can be almost as pleasurable as feeling such exhilaration yourself. That morning my wife and I (both 60-somethings) had donned full-body wet suits, and, with the help of an expert surfer, had had our first experiences riding waves on a surf board. Making our first runs lying prone on the board, feeling the power of the ocean, even taking a few body-tumbling spills, was joyfully thrilling.
In the 19th-century, in the conclusion to his The Renaissance Walter Pater wrote (to the great displeasure of religious conservatives): “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life....Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us in the brilliancy of their gifts is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.”
[Oregon sunset photo by Anne Hornyak. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]
One of the most valuable gifts that writers, composers, and visual artists can receive is an extended stretch of time to focus on their work without the usual daily distractions. I just spent two weeks in a pilot program for a new artist residency created by the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. These residencies will take place in a lovely area of the 13,000 acre Brush Creek Ranch, located in a fabulously beautiful part of Wyoming.
Most of us are usually so surrounded by instantly available distractions and obligations that we sometimes forget what it is like to work with singular focus for days at a time.
The Brush Creek residency buildings are log structures, some of which were found locally, then dissembled and rebuilt in their new location. They were modernized with new roofs, electricity, and electric heat in the process. Each resident is assigned a work studio, and in a long log building each are assigned a bedroom with a bathroom—all of which were nicely furnished. There was a common library, kitchen, and dining area.
Everything was set up to let us work without distraction. Our meals were provided, with dinner being the only meal we were expected to eat in common. The other residents are not allowed to come to your studio unless invited. There were no televisions anywhere. The location is remote enough so that only one cell phone service worked (in this case AT&T). There was Wi-Fi internet which provided a way to stay in touch when necessary, but not with the blazingly-fast high connection speed many of us have at home.
For me, while at the residency, the distractions of daily life seemed remote and out of sight. Things such as bills, grocery shopping, chores, choosing where and what to eat, attending meetings, being on time—all such problems were temporarily absent. I could go to bed thinking about my project (finishing an opera) and wake up thinking about it, knowing that I could spend as many hours of the day as I wanted working on it.
If as a resident you became mentally exhausted, you could take a walk in a stunningly beautiful landscape—seeing marmots, mule deer, horses, cattle, hummingbirds, goldfinches, swallows, hawks, and vultures. In my case I sometimes took a couple of hours to fly fish in some of the area’s world-class creeks and rivers.
In two weeks at the residency I finished work I had calculated would probably take more than a month. Much of that work efficiency came simply from staying focused. Books on time management sometimes say that in order to do some things, we need to deliberately choose not to do others. In our constantly plugged-in world, sometimes it is valuable to be reminded of what it is like to work when we are unplugged from everything except the one most important project we are trying to accomplish. Being reminded of that might just help us seriously reevaluate the way we spend our time once we get home.
While dining last night at the Bluehour (shown to the left), one of the most fashionable contemporary restaurants in Portland’s Pearl District, my wife Carol commented that part of the expense of dining there was paying to have beautiful servers. Once she mentioned this, I realized that the serving staff was indeed remarkably attractive.
The stylish young hostess who seated us had long, curly blonde hair and wore a little red dress that, while undeniably sexy, was too fashionable to look cheap. The host (floor manager?) was young, tall, handsome, and wore a beautifully tailored black suit.
The other servers were all dressed in white. Carol thought that the young woman who filled our water glasses was more beautiful than Alicja Bachleda, the striking actress in Ondine, a film we had recently seen. This young woman had the tall, thin figure of a runway model, and, like runway models, she and the tall, handsome male servers maintained neutral expressions as they fulfilled their duties.
Their task, I realized, was not to engage with us. Instead, their role was to slip in like attractive, lithe-limbed apparitions and magically do whatever was needed to maintain the glamour of our dining experience. As when, for example, the knife I had used to spread butter was, at the proper moment, whisked away with effortless grace and replaced with a new one.
Our waiter was also dressed in white, and was tall, trim, older, and slightly balding. He seemed to love his work. He had a highly engaging smile, and a manner so relaxed that you immediately felt at ease. This made it easy to ask questions about the more exotic ingredients in various entrées.
The food was remarkably good and inventive, but the impression that I was most left with was now effortless the whole remarkable dining experience had been made to seem. Castiglione’s term sprezzatura came to mind because the staff appeared to handle everything with effortless grace, thus concealing the training and experience that had made this possible.
That maintaining this sense of effortlessness is difficult was made apparent the following evening. While dining in another fine restaurant the floor manager called attention to herself by wearing an ill-fitting suit made out of cheap material. A small mistake compared to the great food, but it led us to wonder if there would be other small mistakes. And once we had switched to that frame of mind, naturally enough, we did notice a few other flaws.
Restaurants often seem to have a hard time putting together a congruous dining experience. On the road last week we ate at a restaurant that someone in an art gallery told us would be the most interesting local place to try. The host and staff were nicely dressed, and the menu was elegantly printed, with some inventive entrees. The background music was interestingly eclectic, a mix of 40s music and rock classics. The decor was nicely done, with one glaring exception—the art on the walls looked like framed high-school art projects—mostly really bad stuff. The food was quite good, but the art was off-putting enough to downgrade the whole experience.
Next morning we had breakfast in a restaurant in a historic hotel. The room was nicely painted in Victorian style, with lovely botanical prints on most walls, and two large 19th-century engravings hung near a pair of beautiful Victorian sideboards. The food was good, but I was astonished that the music was a radio station playing rap. The servers and cooks must have chosen the station, because it was completely incongruous with the setting and the restaurant’s clientele.
In Santa Fe, which has numerous fine restaurants, we had some memorable meals in which everything about the experience was in harmony. A tapas restaurant had simple wooden tables, good art, nice decor, excellent food and wine, and a Spanish guitarist.
An elegant and eclectic French/American restaurant also had done everything well, although I still can’t fully understand why 1940s big-band music is so often used as background music for restaurants that are striving for an aura of elegance. I suspect that the '40s evoke an aura of elegant film and night-club glamour typically absent from our visual imagery of contemporary pop-music performers and performance venues. But surely there are other possibilities.
Our strangest on-the-road dining experience was an Italian restaurant in a city in southern Colorado. We tried it because our motel gave us coupons for a complimentary glass of wine (which turned out to be almost undrinkable). Almost every sauce (even the Marinara) included cream, and most of the patrons were notably overweight.
My wife commented to the waitress that the music was awfully loud, and she replied that it was only because one of the waitresses was now singing. Ah, a restaurant with singing waiters—a perilous prospect. As feared, we soon had the excruciating experience of hearing “Over the Rainbow” sung by a mediocre, too often out-of-tune soprano who didn’t understand how to use a mike. Thankfully, a couple of the other servers did a better job, allowing us enough time to eat modest amounts of our over-rich, gargantuan servings of food, and then quickly make our escape.
[Photo of "Pancetta-Wrapped Peaches with Basil and Aged Balsamic" by thebittenword.com. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
I've been enjoying Christian Esquevin's Silver Screen Modiste blog, which he started in December 2010, for the past six months or so and, thanks to a Google search, knew that he lives in Southern California (he's director of library services for the city of Coranado). So when I went to the Debbie Reynolds auction, I made a point of looking for him in line. Sure enough, Christian arrived not long after I did. In our conversation there and in his subsequent blogposts on the auction, he provided valuable insight for my Bloomberg View column. I also learned that he has a large collection of costume design sketches, which are a beautiful art in themselves. Christian kindly agreed to share a few sketches (don't even think of reusing them without permission), as well as some thoughts on the art and history of movie costumes.
DG: How did you get interested in Hollywood costumes?
Christian Esquevin: My interest came relatively late. My great-aunt had been the head cutter-fitter at the RKO studio during the 1930s. Although I had heard some of her stories growing up, it was not until she bequeathed me many of her photos and costume sketches that I became interested. This interest grew into a passion as I researched many of the unknowns about these beautiful items.
DG: You've written a book about Adrian, who with Edith Head is probably the most famous Hollywood costume designer. What makes his work particularly significant?
CE: There were, and are still, many great costume designers for films. Adrian, I believe, was a genius. He combined his artistic and fashion abilities with the needs of the movie character and the actor playing the part to make indelible images. I truly believe that along with costume designer Travis Banton he created the modern look of glamour.
You can actually look at a photo of some of their creations and say that there was no precedent for such a look – that’s where modern glamour started. Take any of several photos of Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, or Carole Lombard for example. The look of knock-your-eyes-out glamour is there, and it’s still the look today. And with Adrian, you can look at fashion at the time (late 1920s and 1930s) and draw the connection between his costume designs for the stars on film and what women wanted to wear around the world. His looks have been knocked-off for so long that people nowadays can no longer make that connection. Yves St. Laurent was heavily influenced by Adrian in the 1960s, but it’s YSL that gets the mentions.
Los Angeles is always being compared unfavorably with other cities in fashion creation and influence. But in the 1930s and early 1940s, Los Angeles and Hollywood were where fashion trends were started, and that was due to the influence of costume designers like Adrian.
DG: You're now writing a book on Irene, Walter Plunkett, and Helen Rose. What should people know about them?
CE: These three costume and fashion designers were as influential and accomplished in their day as Dior or Schiaparelli. They all led fascinating creative lives designing the looks of movie-star icons, yet who hears of them today?
If your resume stated that you created the costume designs for Gone with the Wind, Singing in the Rain, and King Kong among many others, as it would for Walter Plunkett, people would be impressed. Or that you designed Grace Kelly’s wedding gown, much of Elizabeth Taylor’s early wardrobe, and for such stars as Lena Horne, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Cyd Charisse, Doris Day, Esther Williams, Debbie Reynolds, and many others, people would take notice.
As for Irene Lentz Gibbons, known simply as Irene, it was said at the time that she dressed everyone in Hollywood. [The sketch to the left is one of Irene's designs for Easter Parade.--vp] Since she worked both as a costume designer and a fashion designer with her own boutique and then her own fashion business, she really did work with many leading ladies. Her customers and stars included Marlene Dietrich, Loretta Young, Carole Lombard, Dolores Del Rio, Ava Gardner, Greta Garbo, and many others. When you look at her gowns and suits you’ll quickly see why she was so admired. They are impeccable and drop-dead gorgeous. While each of these designers is fascinating in their own right, they all worked at MGM at the same time for a period. What a combination – a unique time and place in history that will never be repeated. I just couldn’t leave that story alone.
DG: You collect costume design sketches. How do the clothes change from sketch to actual garment to what we see on film? What's the difference from medium to medium?
CE: I’ll talk about the process during the classic, “studio system,” which is what I’m most familiar with. At that time the studios employed virtually all the talent they needed on a long-term basis. In the wardrobe department this was a vertical integration, so that a designer had one or more “cutter-fitters” they worked with, and seamstresses working under them. These skilled cutter-fitters made muslin patterns based on the costume sketch a designer created. And consider that the costumes fabricated could be Elizabethan, classic Roman, or satin glamour gowns.
The costume sketch itself could be rendered by a sketch artist that had the artistic ability to paint figures and costumes. In these cases the sketch artist had to develop a close working relationship with the designer. Some designers wanted to do the sketch themselves. Adrian, for example, did not want anyone else “interpreting” his designs.
After the cutter-fitter used the sketch to devise patterns, the seamstresses would sew the final fabric based on the individual pattern pieces and then sew them for the fitting. Beaders and embroiderers would also base their work on the sketch.
Still, changes came about in the movie-making process. So some costumes were later modified from the original sketch for the movie. Edith Head liked to change her costume designs as she went along. Adrian wanted his costumes to look just like his sketch.
What is particularly fascinating about having an original production-made costume sketch is that this is an artifact that was handled by the stars, the director, often the producer, and the artisans that made the costume itself, as well as the designer. These pieces often have approval initials from these individuals, as well as budget information on the back. They are unique pieces of Hollywood film history.
DG: Can you share a few of your favorite sketches with our readers and tell us a bit about them?
CE: I have many sketches, and each is special in its own way. Although they have traditionally been called “costume sketches,” they are really water-color paintings, with more attention taken than would a pencil sketch. They were nonetheless working tools, and equally important, they represented the costume designer’s original design. I emphasize this because there are also pieces floating around that were often done many years after a film had been made. These were often done by the designers themselves as commemorative illustrations, or because they did not possess the original sketches, and were made for some of their fashion shows. Since these were done as show pieces, they are typically exact reproductions of how the costume looked on film. But even as working tools, the sketches are usually beautiful – they had to “sell” the director and star on that look.
I have picked a few that I like and I think will be of interest to the viewers, or that illustrate a point I want to make about costume designing and sketches. One of the icons of the movies is Sunset Blvd. with Gloria Swanson. The costumes were designed by Edith Head. This is the costume sketch for Gloria Swanson’s opening scene in the film. It’s interesting because it’s not a regular dress but rather what was then called a hostess gown or hostess dress which was worn over pants. You only notice that when she descends the stairs in the movie. As with many of Edith’s designs, the final costume was changed in that the interior lining was no longer a plaid but rather a leopard print.
Here is another Edith Head costume sketch, done for Betty Hutton in Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek in 1942 (left). Edith Head sketches are pretty rare from the early 40s. Over her long career her sketches look quite different. That’s because she used different sketch artists over time and each had their own artistic style. Also, many costume sketches are never signed. When it was a real production sketch, everyone knew who the designer was, so it was not necessary to sign the piece. Sometimes that makes identifying a particular sketch difficult. The next sketch is also by Edith Head from this period, but there is nothing to identify who it was for or for what film.
The next two are costume sketches designed by and rendered by Oscar winning costume designer Mary Wills. The first was done for Joan Collins in The Virgin Queen in 1955. Joan played Beth Throgmorton in the film. A fabric swatch is attached. This costume was one sold at the Debbie Reynolds auction. The next one was also from Mary Wills and was done for “extras” in the outdoor market scene in Hans Christian Andersen starring Danny Kaye. This is one of many sketches Mary Wills did for a variety of outdoor vendors that made the scene really come to life. The sketch looks more like it was painted on an easel at the actual Copenhagen market than a costume sketch in a studio.
This sketch by Donfeld (Don Feld) was done for Angelica Huston in Prizzi’s Honor. Donfeld’s sketching style was very distinctive, with exaggerated long limbs. This sketch was probably done later than the actual film production sketch.
Here is a costume sketch designed by Helen Rose for Edie Adams in Made in Paris in 1966. The sketch was actually rendered by Donna Peterson, Rose’s long-time sketch artist. Some sketches actually showed two views of the costume, or with and without a jacket or coat.
This sketch was done by William (Billy) Travilla for Sharon Tate in Valley of the Dolls in 1967. Travilla is famous for his costume designs for Marilyn Monroe, a couple of which sold for several millions at the Debbie auction.
DG: Are there any contemporary films whose costumes you particularly admire?
I really liked the costumes designed by Coleen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland last year. This was a challenge because of the fantastical nature of the story and the well established look of most of the characters, but she did a great job. Another “fantasy” type movie was The Tempest, with costumes designed by Sandy Powell for Helen Mirren, Felicity Jones, and the other cast members. Powell really created the fantastical look of these characters based on the Shakespeare play.
For more contemporary costume I liked A Single Man, with costumes by Arianne Phillips and directed by Tom Ford. You’d expect the best costumes to come with a Tom Ford movie, and these did not disappoint both for the men’s and women’s wardrobe. And for those period costumes that are close to the “Mad Men” rage, there’s Revolutionary Road, designed by veteran costume designer Albert Wolsky for Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. The one dress that has made the biggest splash over the last several years is Keira Knightly’s green satin, backless gown from Atonement, designed by Jacqueline Durran. The movie was set in the 30s and 1940s, and this gown is really right out of the classic movies of that era.
The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour?
The original meaning of glamour was “to enchant” and that’s what it’s still all about. The person or the dress of glamour is one that captures attention and holds it in a mesmerizing and basically pleasurable way. It is strictly visual, so you know it when you see it without being able to describe it. That’s one reason why new looks in fashion or glamour occur.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon?
There are several, including classic icons such as Jean Harlow, Loretta Young, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, and Catherine Deneuve, and more contemporary ones like Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, and Marion Cotillard.
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity?
It is a luxury, but also a necessity in that it’s a human need that many people pursue.
4) Favorite glamorous movie?
There are many, but I’ll mention Dinner at Eight, The Women, Shanghai Express, To Catch a Thief, and The Thomas Crowne Affair (with McQueen & Dunaway).
[Questions 5, 6, and 7 omitted.]
8) Most glamorous job?
I think that even creating art, music, beauty, or fashion involves toil. Creating glamour is work, and displaying glamour oneself becomes a role. The most fun is being the person watching glamour.
9) Something or someone that other people find glamorous and you don't
Parties. I would make an exception for the “masked ball” parties that were held in France by such bon-vivants as Carlos de Beistegui during the first half of the last century, for which I was regrettably not around.
10) Something or someone that you find glamorous whose glamour is unrecognized
Formal dining outdoors for lunch.
11) Can glamour survive?
It will, but it’s always in short supply.
12) Is glamour something you're born with?
No. But It helps if you’re born in the right milieu. Mostly you acquire glamour through cultivation. Some people acquire it through the expertise of others. Garbo was glamorous on the screen, but it was Adrian that created that glamour for her.
[Sketches are owned by Christian Esquevin and used with permission. Do not even think of republishing them without permission. Tumblr counts as publishing.]
I first read about leaning boards in Ronald L. Davis’s The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood's Big Studio System. Davis writes, “For the screen, clothes, above all, must be photogenic. Comfort and practicality were of little concern. Many of [Adrian’s] gowns were too tight for actresses to sit in, requiring them to recline on ‘leaning boards’ between takes.”
Jean Harlow in Dinner at Eight (left) and Katharine Hepburn with costume designer Walter Plunkett in Sea of Grass
This bit of film history struck me as the perfect example of how the grace you see on the screen is created by hiding the -- in this case, literal -- support behind the scenes. But I'd never seen a photo of a leaning board, and imagined that perhaps there weren't any, until Christian Esquevin included one in this Silver Screen Modiste post about MGM's costume operations.
Were there more? I asked Christian. There were, indeed, and he kindly scanned some to share with DG readers. In the two above, the leaning board is doing what Davis suggested in his book, allowing actresses in very tight dresses to rest without sitting. (Closely examined, the Hurrell photos from Dinner at Eight reveal that Harlow was sewn into her Dinner at Eight dress, sans underwear.)
In the third photo, of Rosamond Pinchot as Queen Anne in The Three Musketeers, the costume is not so much tight as heavy. The same is true of the photo Christian featured in his blog post. There, Jane Halsey is wearing a 102-pound beaded costume for The Great Ziegfeld.
That got me to thinking. Nowadays, Lycra makes tight gowns a lot easier to move in (though wrinkles are always a potential issue). But what did Natalie Portman (and the rest of the cast) do between takes while wearing those elaborate costumes in the (execrable) Star Wars prequel? Are leaning boards still around?
Tomorrow we'll have a Q&A with Christian Esquevin, including some wonderful examples from his collection of costume design sketches. Tune in.
[Photos from the collection of Christian Esquevin.]
Florentine authorities and residents were appalled when the cast of MTV’s “Jersey Shore” invaded the Tuscan capital for the show’s fourth season, which will debut Aug. 4. What were Snooki and The Situation doing associating themselves with the refined city of Dante and Botticelli (not to mention Ferragamo)? Even New Jersey won’t claim these louts.
The ostensible idea was to pay homage to the cast members’ Italian heritage. But these hyper-American descendants of peasants from Italy’s far southern regions hardly represent the Florentine heritage of art, humanism and elegant style. Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and Jennifer “JWoww” Farley aren’t even of Italian descent. The cast’s Florence connection is quite a stretch.
But stretching, it turns out, puts them in a great Florentine tradition. Brand-building through misleading images wasn’t invented on Madison Avenue or Hollywood. Many of Florence’s Renaissance treasures are monuments to exaggeration for the purposes of self-promotion. The medium may have changed, but the motives haven’t. It’s a bit of history that today’s Wall Street billionaires, who have a bit of a collective image problem, might want to study.
The Renaissance patrons who paid for all those frescoes, paintings, altar pieces and sculptures weren’t generally funding beauty for its own sake. They were buying status -- building their brands, we’d say today. Their patronage showed off their wealth and piety and, in many cases, advertised their supposed links to the prestigious and powerful. In the process, these patrons often shaded the truth, leaving out unflattering facts and suggesting associations they didn’t in fact have.
Know what to look for and Florentine artworks reveal secret messages that, while not as sexy as Dan Brown’s Mona Lisa fantasies, have the advantage of actually existing.
Take the boys shown walking up the stairs behind their tutor in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco in the Santa Trinita church. What could these kids have to do with the “Confirmation of the Rule of Saint Francis,” the official subject of the fresco? They aren’t friars or church officials.
In fact, their portraits are just good public relations. The patron, a banker named Francesco Sassetti, included them to butter up their father, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and to let the churchgoing public know that he and Lorenzo were tight.
But the painting doesn’t tell the whole story. It “conveniently omits a crucial fact about the patron’s relationship with the Medici,” write art historian Jonathan K. Nelson and economist Richard Zeckhauser in their book, The Patron's Payoff, which uses economic signaling theory to analyze Renaissance patrons’ motivations and techniques. That fact: “By the time he commissioned the fresco, Sassetti had nearly run the Geneva branch of the Medici bank into bankruptcy.” Oops. Maybe the portraits were meant as a distraction or damage control. How could you fire (or worse) a man who had sponsored such fine pictures of your kids?
Nelson and Zeckhauser’s work demonstrates that Renaissance art is full of status signals and calculated image-building -- once-obvious messages that today’s tourists never notice. Nelson, who is the art history coordinator at Syracuse University’s campus in Florence, showed me some examples at Santa Maria Novella, the church dedicated to the Virgin Mary that stands near Florence’s train station. (It was novella, or new, in the 13th century.)
“He who seeks beauty shall find it” is the personal motto of 82-year old fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. He’s been riding around on his bicycle, photographing fashion on the streets of New York City for roughly half a century. And although his name and reputation are well established in the fashion world, his personal “fashion philosophy” is by no means conventional.
In the movie Bill Cunningham New York, Bill comes off as a mysteriously simple character, a happy man who loves what he does and does what he loves. But there’s more; in fact, there are many complex and profound ideas wrapped up in the way Bill views fashion and culture, all of which inform the pictures he takes.
When photographing runway shows in Paris, he says, “If it isn’t something a woman could wear, I’m not interested.” His down-to-earth, fun-loving attitude makes fashion approachable to all. He praises daring and originality in clothing choices above all. He’s not afraid to call an outfit boring, no matter who’s wearing it. He may ignore a celebrity on the street wearing a multi-thousand dollar gown in favor of a bag-lady digging in the garbage, whose overlapping patterned shawls and head-scarves he thinks are “marvelous.”
Bill Cunningham’s straightforwardness stems from his ethical commitment to honesty and to celebrating individual creativity. He takes a firm stance against fashion magazines’ “In & Out” lists for attempting to dictate from the top-down what’s “in fashion” and what isn’t. Part of his opposition is moral and the other part is practical. He understands that no matter what magazines and designers decree, real fashion—what is actually “in”—can only be determined from the bottom up, by what everyday people actually wear.
To me, it seems that Cunningham’s incredible ability to capture weekly street-style trends is made possible by his understanding of how culture works. Bill’s photographs show us that in the city, fashion is a silent dialogue between people on the streets. Some respond to the latest designs from Paris; others adopt and revise the looks of those around them, incorporating good ideas from anywhere they can be found. People’s clothing choices are also often responding to the conditions of the local climate and Bill traces these complex and spontaneous orders with skill and grace (see “Boiling Point,” documenting the woven, eyelet fabrics of the hot New York week of August 14, 2009).
In de-emphasizing the role of “top-down” dictates from the fashion elite, Bill Cunningham helps us see how we, as everyday people, have the opportunity to participate in the fashion world. “I’m not interested in celebrities with their free dresses,” he says, “I’m interested in clothes!” He calls our attention to the role each of us has as a potential contributor to the silent dialogue of fashion with the choices we make in front of our mirrors each morning.
Click here for a list of when and where the film is showing.
The photos all present idealized versions of the stars--but what a range of ideals they represent, from the refined elegance of Grace Kelly to the sultry seductiveness of Rita Hayworth's Gilda, from Vivian Leigh in hyperfeminine white ruffles to Marlene Dietrich tough and dominant in a crisp blouse and slacks. And those are just (a few of) the women. Click the slideshow link for a selection.
Reviewing the London exhibit in The Independent, Matthew Bell praised it for giving visitors a hint of the effort behind the effortlessness:
The most interesting image isn't on the wall. It's tucked in a cabinet and is of Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, marked up for retouching. A backroom worker has criss-crossed the areas that need work – stubble and hairy hands for him, crow's feet and a flabby jawline for her. If you have been duped into believing in the fantasy of Hollywood, this snap brings you down to earth.
Like Debbie Reynolds's late-lamented costume collection, the John Kobal Collection originated with MGM's previously mentioned mother of all garage sales. In the '60s and '70s, when Golden Age glamour was out of fashion and studios were dumping their archives, Kobal bought and preserved prints and negatives, befriended aging stars and photographers, and documented their stories. Most of the classic images you see reproduced today come from his archives, now licensed by Getty Images.
The George Hurrell photos occasionally featured on DG are exceptions. They're courtesy of our friends at the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive, which has just put together a beautiful new site, including a blog, at GeorgeHurrell.com. If you like classic Hollywood glamour photography, be sure to check it out.
This rare photo of Greta Garbo smiling belongs to the Pancho Barnes Trust Estate Archive, maintained by DG friend Louis D'Elia. It was taken by the great Hollywood portrait photographer George Hurrell in his one and only session with Garbo--a shoot to promote her 1930 film Romance.
Garbo did not like the antics Hurrell used to get his subjects to relax and look natural, and refused to work with him again. (Clarence Sinclair Bull became her photographer of choice.) But she did crack a smile when Hurrell tripped over some equipment, and he managed to capture the moment.
I examined the photos from this shoot when I wrote a catalog essay for a 2006 exhibit of Hurrell photos from the Pancho Barnes collection. (A version of that essay later appeared in The Atlantic.) While working on the essay, I noticed that the earrings in the Garbo photos reappeared in one of my favorite Hurrell portraits, this one of the woman Hurrell himself considered his "most mysterious" subject: Myrna Loy.
Remembered today mostly as the comedienne star of the Thin Man movies, for many years Loy was cast as an "exotic," thanks to her almond eyes. (For an amazing collection of Myrna Loy photos, from many phases of her career, check out this blog.) Like Garbo, she was an MGM star when Hurrell was the studio's chief portrait photographer.
As I've mentioned in my posts and article about the Debbie Reynolds collection auction, while MGM created lavish costumes, it also recycled them. The same was true, of course, of accessories, and here's the photographic evidence. As always, click the photo to see a larger version.
Over at Silver Screen Modiste, Christian Esquevin has a second excellent post on the Debbie Reynolds costume auction, which includes a sad note on why the collection was so heavy on period costumes. Debbie Reynolds bought the foundations of her collection as when MGM had the mother of all garage sales in 1970, dumping its inventories of props, costumes, photographs--anything that could be sold for quick cash. (Twentieth Century Fox did the same a year later.) Christian writes:
Most of the studio's wardrobe at that time consisted of period costumes, which is by and large reflected in the strength of Debbie's collection. That MGM had many years earlier dumped many costumes in its wardrobe collection is little known. Due to the small value that was ascribed to contemporary fashion, and the lack of its re-usability in later films, many crown jewels of costume were destroyed. By the time of the 1970 MGM auction, many of those late 1920s and 1930s costumes were already gone. These had been the costumes that created the very image of glamorous Hollywood movie-stars, and that started fashion trends around the world. The Adrian-designed gowns worn by Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Joan Crawford that defined the look of glamour were mostly discarded. It is informative to consider the sale of Debbie's collection as reflecting the earlier MGM auction and the even earlier destruction of those movie costumes.
Yet even as scholars and fans mourn the collection’s breakup, dreaming of the museum that might have been, they admit the importance of private collectors. These enthusiasts may not all preserve artifacts in museum-quality condition, keeping costumes unaltered and mostly in the dark. But without the sometimes-eccentric people who buy at auctions out of their own passion to own a piece of movie history, no one would have saved these objects in the first place.
“Thank God for them,” says Deborah Landis. “Thank God for Debbie. We would have nothing. It would have been rags. That was the old way. We used everything until it fell off the hanger. That was the tradition in Hollywood.”
In my Bloomberg View column on the Debbie Reynolds collection auction, I cite some of the waist measurements Lisa Urban took from the costumes. But column prose didn't allow for the full inventory, which should be kept for historical interest. Here, in alphabetical order with links to the photos (much better than my snapshots) and auction results for each costume, is the full list. The numbers are the auction lot numbers. In a decision I now regret, I did not request a measurement of Audrey Hepburn's My Fair Lady Ascot dress, because everyone knows she was thin, the same reason I didn't ask Lisa to take any Katharine Hepburn measurements.
The biggest surprise to me was that Deborah Kerr's waist was as large as 24 inches. Her costumes, particularly the black gown from An Affair to Remember, are strikingly svelte and, like Marilyn's white dress, couldn't be fully fastened in the back, as you can see by my photo of her Catherine Parr gown. I was also surprised that the Ginger Rogers dress had a 24-inch waist. It looks even smaller in person.
We should never again hear anyone declare that Marilyn Monroe was a size 12, a size 14 or any other stand-in for full-figured, zaftig or plump. Fifteen thousand people have now seen dramatic evidence to the contrary. Monroe was, in fact, teeny-tiny.
The 15,000 were the visitors who turned out over eight days to oooh and aaah at the preview exhibit for the June 18 auction of Debbie Reynolds’s extraordinary collection of Hollywood costumes, props and other memorabilia.
The two comments heard most often in the crowded galleries were (to paraphrase), “Wow, they were thin” and “It’s such a shame. These things should be in a museum.”
The two remarks are in fact related. The former demonstrates the truth of the latter.
When the auctioneer’s final hammer came down at 1:20 in the morning, the world lost a treasure. The collection Reynolds assembled over 40 years will now be fragmented and dispersed. “It was a melancholy day for Los Angeles and the rest of the country,” wrote Christian Esquevin on his Silver Screen Modiste blog, expressing a common sentiment. “We will never see the likes of this collection again.”
The movie business has never particularly valued its historical artifacts. Hollywood, notes director John Landis, treats costumes and props as “industrial waste,” to be recycled or discarded but not displayed or preserved. It also keeps an embarrassed distance from the enthusiasts who treasure such relics. Unlike, say, science fiction, the mainstream movie industry doesn’t embrace cult followings. And Los Angeles is notorious for its paucity of institution-building philanthropists.
Our next contest marks a departure from the usual skin-care goodies. UPrinting.com is offering one lucky reader 250 2" x 3.5" sheet stickers (70lb label matte, front only printing, 4 business days turnaround), using their standard label templates.
Like most of our contests, this one came about through an unsolicited email from a publicist. But it so happens that UPrinting is, in fact, the printer DeepGlamour has used for our business cards, stationery, and hat party posters. Although they do most of their business online, their physical print shop is right around the corner from my house. I've used them for other jobs as well. (For hosting the contest, I'll also receive stickers.)
To enter, leave a comment below about what kind of stickers you'd like to make or share a memory of a sticker you've seen or enjoyed. The winner will be chosen using Random.org.
Deadline for entries is midnight, June 30. Contest limited to U.S. residents 18 years old and above only.
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]
On a recent visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, I was struck by this painting, Pergola with Oranges by Thomas Fearnley. At first it seems like a basic exercise in perspective--all those lines converging at a vanishing point. But it didn't feel like mere geometry. The golden light, the oranges, the flowers, and the Mediterranean architecture seemed emotionally resonant, and intentionally so. Wouldn't it be great to join the man reading in the sun?
The museum's brief caption suggests I was right. If the date is correct (and it may be based on the assumption that the artist was working from life rather than memory), Fearnley painted this scene during a three-year sojourn in Italy. But he was a Norwegian--someone decidedly not from a land of golden sunshine and oranges so abundant they roll on the ground. He would have appreciated how special the scene was and I think he injected some of that emotion into the painting. But maybe it's in the eye of the beholder.
On a recent visit to New York, I snapped this photo with my dumb phone. (The low-res quality actually makes it look a little more glamorous than it did in real life.) It's a perfect example of why declaring something "glamorous" doesn't make it so. If you can't even manage to keep up your sign, why should we expect the building to be any better?
Here's another example, a screen shot of the website for the then-newly remodeled Peninsula Hotel in Shanghai. I was looking at the website while planning a trip to look for glamour in Shanghai. This carelessness convinced me not to look for it at the Peninsula.
Skindinavia makeup finishing sprays set your makeup so it lasts all day, defying the weather, overactive oil glands, and whatever else might conspire to make your skin look less than its best.
For this giveaway, we're pleased to offer the winner a choice of one of three formulations: 10 Years Younger, for drier more mature skin; Moisture Lock, which hydrates the skin; or No More Shine, for oily foreheads and unwanted summer shine.
To enter, post a comment below telling us about someone you think has beautiful skin. We will select a winner using Random.org.
Entry deadline: midnight Pacific Time, June 17. Contest open only to U.S. residents of the 50 states and District of Columbia.
Every so often I get a publicist pitch telling me that in these days of email, there's a renewed interest in handwritten notes. I'm skeptical, but there is definitely something seductive about great paper -- stationery, wrapping paper, notebooks -- even if you never actually use it.
As we head into prime wedding season, I'm also reminded of how much the process of creating wedding invitations has changed since I was married 25 Junes ago. Invitations now come in every shape, color, and font imaginable, offering great opportunities for both meaningful personlization and really horrendous taste.
Enter Wanda Wen, who combines these two themes as the paper-loving the proprietor of Soolip, a paperie in West Hollywood (and online), a designer of letterpress stationery, and the curator of A Soolip Wedding, a selective annual gathering of wedding vendors who share her aesthetic.
DG: Why paper? What does it have in common with the other fashion businesses you've worked in?
Wanda Wen: I have had a fascination with paper since a young age, taking interest in writing letters, mail art, stamps, ephemera, and packaging. I appreciate paper's accessibility in all forms - as everyday, ubiquitous material - i.e. kraft paper bags, thin white sandwich bags, as well as luxurious special-occasion component - i.e. silkscreened Japanese Yuzen, hand-marbled Italian sheets, deckle-edged 100% cotton sheets.
Having had a background in the fashion industry, I approach paper as "fashion." One's personal stationery, calling cards, invitations, and greeting cards are all absolutely an extension of one's aesthetic and personality. There is a breadth of choices in paper, just as much as there is in fashion. When one wants to make a statement putting forth a blue-blood, well-monied air, one set of personal stationery might be engraved in midnight blue, on a 100% cotton thick cardstock, perhaps edged in gold. When that same individual wants to make a fashion-forward statement, she may opt for a set of letterpressed notes printed using two ink colors in a chic typeface.
Similarly, if a classic bride desires a wedding that is formal and conservative, she may choose a classic script typeface, engraved in black on a sturdy cardstock with envelopes lined in a decorative gold sheet. On the other end of the spectrum, a chic, modern bride who is getting married on a farm or ranch would most likely opt for a letterpressed invitation using 100% cotton paper with deckle edges, and possibly enhancing the invitation with pressed flowers and a touch of skinny gold twine wrapped around.
WW: Why does one get dressed in the morning, to head to a business meeting or an evening affair, to only return home and take off their clothes and put on their sweats, pajamas, or nothing? Its all in the presentation.
Seriously, taking time to put thought into wrapping a present for someone shows that you care.
DG: Who are your customers?
WW: Our customers are those who appreciate paper and generally are in tune with aesthetic. Many work in the design industry - graphic, interior, architecture, fashion, and the entertainment business. Though our customer base includes more women, our male clients are very loyal. We also receive a lot of support from those in the event industry.
DG: What are Soolip weddings and how did that idea come about?
WW: The event, A Soolip Wedding, is an event that caters to the modern bride, hopefully inspiring her with beauty in all facets of wedding planning, and providing resources and information that will help her successfully plan a wedding that is perfect in her eyes. I conceptualized this event back in 1999 as I felt there there needed to be one place where the bride and groom with a more modern and refined taste level, could go and find a curated collection of bridal-related resources, offering invitations, flowers, cakes, party favors, gowns, jewels, etc., resources who generally would not be caught dead in the typical convention-center-type bridal fairs. I have always envisioned this event to be a "fashion" experience, as well as being a bridal event, offering the bride a hi-fashion experience with the fashion show, where we typically feature one headline designer.
A Soolip Wedding has become the wedding event of choice by many colleagues in the wedding and event industry. For newcomers in the industry, it is an opportunity to be sitting next to well-known and respected brand names like Harry Winston, Monique Lhuillier, The Peninsula, Williams-Sonoma, giving them an immediate validation in the marketplace. For more mature businesses, it is an opportunity to be in the company of a distinguished group of event providers, thereby strengthening or maintaining their brand name in the industry.
Q: What do your wedding partners have in common?
WW: Our wedding partners are generally very passionate about their businesses and their craft. Their heart and soul are involved, its not just about making money. They generally cater to an upscale market, where the customer is most-likely well-traveled, sophisticated, and appreciates a modern aesthetic.
DG: How has what couples (or brides) want in a wedding changed over the past decade or two?
WW: More than ever, couples desire weddings where intentions are heartfelt, where their wedding is deeply rooted in either cultural heritage or personal values. I find that couples are desiring more intimate weddings, compared to the lavish-for-lavish sake events that were ubiquitous a decade ago.
DG: What does "wedding glamour" mean to you?
WW: A bride and groom who are self-assured and confident, sexy in their own skin, dressed in a gown and a suit/tux that represents who they are, and TOTALLY in love with each other.
DG: Does the idea of a "fairy-tale wedding" still appeal to brides? If so, what does it mean?
WW: Yes, the "fairy-tale wedding" still appeals to brides. However, I think the term has taken on a somewhat of a negative connotation. Brides still want the perfect wedding, but the sophisticated bride certainly wouldn't refer to hers as desiring a "fairy-tale wedding." The "fairy-tale wedding" or "perfect" wedding is one where the bride plays the main part in this beautiful and enchanted fantasy that she has dreamed up for herself, sometimes for years and years. The wedding is the one time in a woman's life where it is socially okay to go all out and be extravagant on herself, and throw a party where all her favorite things are in place - the perfect gown, the most amazing food, her most favorite flowers, invitations that connote this special event, her personal self at her best and most beautiful.
I've been saying for years, and hoping that this resonates with brides and grooms, my idea of a perfect wedding. It is rooted in gratitude, living in the present, and respecting each other and the wedding guests, versus the "fairy-tale wedding," which is rooted in a self-serving mentality.
A perfect wedding is one in which all the unexpected surprises and events turn into the most glorious and memorable moments.
It is one in which all the details are tended to, and where each and every guest feels special, honored and considered.
A perfect wedding is one that is a reflection of the bride and groom, and nobody else.
Finally, a perfect wedding is one in which the process of getting married is as fun as the wedding day itself, and that most importantly, that the meaning behind getting married is not lost in the process.
DG: Explain the idea of a couple's garden.
WW: Wanting to integrate something meaningful and grounding into the process of getting married, and desiring to see individuals play their part in stewardship of the Mother Earth, the very thing that sustains us all, the Couple's Garden was born. The idea is for the newly-engaged to plant an edible and/or floral garden during their engagement period, sharing the bounty with their family and friends at the wedding, whether it be lettuce greens to be used in the salad at the wedding dinner, or flowers that they've grown together to be a part of the bride's bouquet as she walks down the aisle. The garden symbolizes birth, nurturing, growth and sustenance, all qualities that a healthy marriage is made of.
I think more than ever, couples are wanting to find more meaning in their wedding, and are taking more interest in creating things of their own, DIY in some cases. I see this as a good trend, and something that bodes well for the health of our society.
The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour? Self-assured, charming, and sexy but in a graceful way
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon? Marilyn Monroe
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity? Neither. It is a character trait that just "is".
4) Favorite glamorous movie? Can't think of one right now.
5) What was your most glamorous moment? Going to a ball in the 1980's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a bunch of conservative lawyers and their wives, and wearing a flesh-colored fish-scale sequin long body-conforming dress, with silver Skull Earrings, all by Stephen Sprouse. Far from being a celebrity at 26 years old and being new to NYC, I made it in the society pages, probably because of that dress.
6) Favorite glamorous object (car, accessory, electronic gadget, etc.)? My mother's vibrant green Jade and Diamond Ring from Hong Kong
7) Most glamorous place? Paris
8) Most glamorous job? Any job where one is at the top of their game. They call the shots. That is alluring, sexy and powerful.
9) Something or someone that other people find glamorous and you don't Fashion industry jobs
10) Something or someone that you find glamorous whose glamour is unrecognized My Mother
11) Can glamour survive? Of course. Always.
12) Is glamour something you're born with? Don't think so. Glamour comes with maturity and wisdom.
Earlier this week Apple released an update to the font rendering part of OS-X 10.6 because there had been a problem with rendering some Open-Type fonts. Adobe’s Minion-Pro has become my favorite text font for music notation, and I had been baffled when Minion Pro had stopped working in Sibelius, the music notation software that I use.
As soon as I saw the notice of the update, I became excited, thinking that this might solve the problem, and “hooray!” it did. At breakfast I began excitedly telling my wife about all this, telling her how beautiful the font is, and how it was designed by the same designer who had designed Arno Pro, and that the designer was named Robert Slimbach. I knew I had gone too far when I recalled the font designer’s name off the top of my head, and, sure enough, my wife gave me an OMG-I’m-married-to-a-geek look.
I had been using Times New Roman in the meantime, but it is hard to explain how much more beautiful I thought the opera score I was working on looked with the text in Minion Pro. Minion has become one of the most popular book fonts since its release in 1990. It is simply beautiful, if not glamorous—assuming you are into fonts.
And it looks especially nice on the 30-inch backlit LED Apple Cinema Display screen I recently purchased because I was so jealous whenever I saw my wife using hers. It was the only choice that she had when she bought a new Mac Pro, but as soon as I saw it I knew that sooner or later I had to have one too. Ultimately there was no justification for my buying a new display, but I did, and now everytime I bring up a music score, and I look at this beautiful screen (now displaying Minion Pro as the text font in all its glory), it makes me happy. And, I want to compose. In this case a glamorous screen and a glamorous font help motivate me to work.
In 2006, Salman Rushdie gave an interview to Der Spiegel in which he was asked about the causes of terrorism. After first demurring, he suggested a few: "a misconceived sense of mission," a "herd mentality," the desire to become "a historic figure," an attraction to violence, and--shocking the interview--glamour.
Q: Do you seriously mean that terrorism is glamorous?
A: Yes. Terror is glamour -- not only, but also. I am firmly convinced that there’s something like a fascination with death among suicide bombers. Many are influenced by the misdirected image of a kind of magic that is inherent in these insane acts. The suicide bomber's imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other peoples lives.
To someone who thinks "glamour" means movie stars and designer dresses, the idea that terrorism is glamorous sounds bizarre. But Rushdie is wise to the deeper meaning of glamour, as a form of magic and persuasion. Glamour is in the audience's eyes, and the phenomenon long preceded Hollywood. Jihadi terrorism in fact combines two ancient forms of glamour--the martial and the religious--with the modern promise of media celebrity.
When your family church is Westminster Abbey, chances are you won’t be allowed to make up your own wedding vows. Your vows will likely come from the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Its eloquence is so memorable that its phrases have become part of our language (“to have and to hold from this day forward”), as have phrases from the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare. All these works were written at a time when eloquence was highly valued, and they were conceived with highly-memorable auditory beauty as a goal.
And although (Sir) Elton John has been invited to the upcoming royal wedding, the music for the ceremony will not be pop songs, but sacred music written for the church over the centuries by some of the greatest composers who ever lived. These include Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Henry Purcell, George Frideric Handel, Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, and many more.
The extraordinary nature of the building, the language, the music, the boy’s choir, the costumes, and all the rest will combine to proclaim to the world that this is no commonplace occasion, but the addition of someone to the status of royalty.
Americans often take a certain pride in having cast off a system that includes inherited positions of royalty and nobility, yet we also remain fascinated and slightly envious of it. Being “royal” is perhaps the world’s most exclusive group. Unless you are born a member, your only chance of getting in is to marry into it.
A royal wedding needs to be a highly visible, tradition-filled public event because it is a rite that makes the pair not only a couple, but a royal couple. The ceremony establishes a legitimate place for that couple’s children in the lineage of the royal family. The question of lineage is not a division of wealth or child custody that can be sorted out by divorce lawyers or pre-nuptial agreements. When inherited title is involved, you are either born with it or not, and the traditions for determining that are centuries old.
Ideally a royal marriage will prove enduring and loving. But this is not always the case, as Britain’s current royal family has demonstrated. Even the highly troubled and ultimately contentious marriage of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, however, dutifully provided the royal family with two legitimate heirs before a fed-up Queen Elizabeth suggested they negotiate a divorce.
[Photo of Westminster Abbey by Wolfiewolf. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]
"An illusion that is known to be false but felt to be true"--a good (partial) definition of glamour. Is it also the source of economic growth?
At the Kauffman Foundation's annual economic bloggers conference, I gave a talk on Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic And The Spirit Of Modern Consumerism, an extremely interesting and provocative book that ties glamour (my word, not his) to the origins of the consumer society and the puzzle of open-ended economic growth. Here's the video:
I don't drink beer, but I occasionally buy it for parties. And when I do, I usually buy Corona, because I like their ads. Corona has long used a images of a tranquil beach to create a distinct brand identity--one that effectively combines gentle humor with the glamour of escape. In the latest campaign, which debuted last fall, Corona ups the glamour quotient further, offering pure projection without even the gentlest silliness to undercut it.
The "Find Your Beach" ads visualize what Corona's ads have always implied (since most beer drinking doesn't take place at the beach): "that the beach is where you make it,” as Marshall Ross, the chief creative officer for Corona's ad agency, Cramer-Krasselt, put it. “We want to give literal, visual permission for people to take the Corona mindset with them. Even to the ski slopes or the big city.” The composition of the images remains similar. The Corona drinkers are shown only from the back or in profile, encouraging identification and projection, and they themselves are gazing at expansive vistas. Grace, mystery, and escape--all the elements of glamour are there.
As I was headed to a going-out-of-business sale at the Border’s Bookstore in Santa Fe, I saw something that probably happens millions of times a day around the world. An older sibling was trying hard not to appear connected to a younger. In the photo shown at left, two sisters are distancing themselves from their parents and younger brother behind them. And, sadly, at some point in her teen years, the older sister will protest if told she needs to let her sister tag along.
In Santa Fe I saw a nattily dressed boy of about seventeen purposely walking very fast, forcing his younger sister to periodically have to run or skip to catch up. He was trim, attractive, and had impeccably styled hair. He was wearing a nice sport coat with a well-matched shirt and tie, nice trousers, and well-polished dress shoes. He perhaps looked a bit preppy for the bookstore, but there was no question he looked confident and sharp.
His younger sister was about thirteen or fourteen, and I could see why he was trying to ditch her. She was pudgy, her hair was a mess, and her unattractive pink dress fit horribly. She had put on a long-sleeved t-shirt under the dress for warmth, and this make her outfit look even worse.
While he looked sophisticated, she looked clueless. Once in the bookstore, they separated, and I never saw him go anywhere near her the whole time I was there.
I told this story at a dinner gathering the other night, and many people starting talking about their relationships with their siblings. One woman’s younger brother (by two years) used to like to hang out with her girl friends when they came over, and she was not happy that her friends found him so funny that they liked having him around. Although she had a good relationship with him, she reached her limit when he tried to join them at their lunch table at high school. After all, she laughingly recalled , “I was a senior!”
No matter how close we might usually be to our siblings, there are times when they can interfere with the image we are trying to project, especially in the strange peer-pressure world of junior high and high school.
[Photo "Hey, Alice, I've been thinking: we're old enough to go out on our own now, without Mom and Dad and our younger brother tagging along and slowing us down" by Ed Yourdon. Used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.]
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.
A small battle takes place each day at the dental office where I get my teeth cleaned. One dentist likes rock music, and if he gets there first, the radio is set to a oldies rock station for the day. If the other dentist gets there first, she sets the radio to a country-western station.
Last week, hearing the music, I assumed that she had gotten there first, but it turned out that on that day she had rebelled against the system. The radio had been on the rock station for several days, and deciding she could not take hearing Cher one more day in a row, she had changed the channel.
Because music often serves as a cultural marker, I assume that cosmetics companies think carefully before choosing singers as representatives. CoverGirl has chosen country singer Taylor Swift (seen above) as one of their current faces, and it would be fascinating to know the demographic considerations that were discussed when they were considering her.
Viva Glam has chosen Lady Gaga as a current representative. In this advertising photo for them she looks far less made-up than she usually does in public appearances. Nonetheless, it reveals a different approach to makeup—reflecting the more over-the-top notion of glamour that Lady Gaga favors. She already serves, for example, as do Cher and Madonna, as a favorite singer for drag queens to impersonate.
Carrie Underwood, another country singer, has a contract with Olay cosmetics, and she seems an apt choice to appeal to a demographic of slightly more mature women than would Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga. It must be fascinating to hear the frank pros and cons that are brought up when cosmetic companies are discussing decisions about product representation. Appealing to their target customers is no doubt big business in terms of sales.
The Academy Awards show is ridiculous. Guests arrive in broad daylight wearing the most formal of evening gowns. Presenters, including some of the world's most accomplished performers, read their lines with the studied cadence of high-school commencement speakers.
In contrast to the Super Bowl, a beauty pageant or "American Idol," nothing happens on stage that affects the outcome of the competition. The production numbers are just padding. And, of course, the speeches are boring, the show is too long, and comedies never have a chance.
Yet the Oscar ceremony somehow manages to be compelling. In a good year like 2010, its U.S. audience tops 40 million, according to Nielsen Co. In a bad year like 2008, it tops 30 million. By contrast, the recent Grammy ceremony, which offers far better musical numbers, won its week with only 26.7 million viewers.
The Oscar show's appeal can't just be the fun of water-cooler criticism. You can get all the information you need for that from Twitter or the next day's newspaper. You don't need to sit through the awards ceremony.
In fact, as the marketing efforts of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences suggest, the glamour of the Oscars lies not in the movies the show ostensibly celebrates, but in the "Oscar moment." Watching the Oscars gives viewers the chance to imagine being singled out before the whole world as special, beloved and really good at their jobs.
To promote the show, the Academy is giving fans in New York City two different chances to pose holding Oscars, either virtual statues or, at Grand Central Terminal, real ones. There, "the big payoff is that you get to go on stage and have your Oscar moment," says Janet Weiss, the Academy's director of marketing. Some people, she says, even show up in gowns and tuxes.
Read the rest here. That's my photo to the right, taken on Friday in Grand Central.
When I asked my Facebook friends to recommend photographers or stylists who could talk knowledgeably about hiding lamp cords, someone gave me a great tip: call Adam Fortner. An Austin-based stylist, Adam started on the editorial side of the profession, as the art director for Texas Architect magazine, later moving to Western Interiors & Design Magazine. In 2007, he founded Creative & Sons, which does photo styling of interiors and objects for editorial and commercial photographers, as well as art direction and production services. (He also has a cool blog, where you can find posts on subjects like decaying Victorian Lego houses and how stylists compose faux grocery lists.) We had such an interesting conversation, moving from lamp cords to other forms of styling magic, that I asked him to share some thoughts and experiences with DeepGlamour readers.
DG: How is styling interiors different from being an interior designer?
Adam Fortner: An interior designer creates spaces that are functional, and we show them off. The main difference is in the format our work takes. An interior designer creates a space that is meant to be experienced in three dimensions. The photographer and stylist’s job is to take that three-dimensional, fluid space and present it in a two-dimensional static photograph within a limited frame. Everything we do serves the photo, which can mean eliminating or moving things so they look best on camera, not necessarily so they function in the space. I tell people you can’t live in a styled room: the chairs are all at odd angles and the coffee table might be three inches from the couch; but look at the photograph and it’s magically transformed from what you see around you.
DG: How is a room different when it's been styled for a magazine photo shoot compared to the way it might look if the owner had cleaned it up for visitors?
AF: For the most part we try to leave the room as we found it, but once we’ve found the angle and framing of the final photograph, adjustments have to be made. At that point a stylist’s job becomes editing. It might be a simple tweak to accommodate the perspective of the camera and show off one detail or another, or filling spaces that might have become visual voids in the frame, or even removing or adjusting things to avoid overlaps or add the appearance of depth. In some cases the accessories or pieces that the designer or client chose just won’t work for a photo and you have to change it. A dark, rich duvet cover may look and feel luxurious in person, but it may fall flat in camera. I am careful to reassure homeowners or clients that it’s not about their personal taste, it’s about the composition and quality of the photo.
My favorite exchange about styling comes from a short-lived sitcom and goes like this:
– Who wants their room photographed anyway so everyone knows what their stuff looks like? – They don’t photograph your stuff; they bring in their own stuff. – Well why don’t we just have them come in and finish the room? – Because if your stuff doesn’t look fabulous in the first place then they don’t want to come in and change it!
DG: What's the purpose of styling a room for a magazine photo? What's the effect you're trying to achieve?
AF: Styling is often called the “hidden profession.” A lot of people don’t know it is even a career, and in fact, to be good at it, that’s the whole point: not to be noticed. So you have to find a balance of studied naturalness. A lot of it is also about aspiration. You want to create a space that people want to be in, one that exemplifies the way people want to live, not necessarily the way they actually live. Honestly, how many people wake up to a vase of flowers, a cup of tea and The New York Times perfectly folded on their nightstand?
DG: How does styling for architects differ from styling for interiors magazines or advertising?
AF: The architect is creating or defining a space, so showing off their work takes a different form. Architects understand and experience spaces in a different way. For them, an open and unadorned space is beautiful in and of itself. They appreciate the clean lines, textures, and light in a room. When styling a space for an architect, you often only need minimal adornments, and what you do use really needs to highlight the architecture. That doesn’t always sell the public, though. Empty spaces can look cold and uninviting at first glance, and it takes a little more time and effort to see the details. A magazine or advertisement doesn’t have that luxury; it needs to grab a viewers’ attention in a split-second. I try to recommend this approach to architects. By creating images that capture people’s attention, they then have the opportunity to guide clients deeper into the details, and have a better chance of communicating their thoughts and ideas.
DG: You've recently done some styling work for shoots done in photo studios rather than real interiors. How is styling different when you build from scratch? What does it teach you about styling in the “real world”?
AF: I think of styling as storytelling. When you work in someone’s home, the story is already there. They’ve created their own world with their own tastes: their books, their art, their furniture; we’re mainly there to enhance and document it. When working in a studio, you’re starting with a blank slate. You have to create the entire story–start to finish–and the sky’s the limit so that allows you a lot more freedom. I’ve been working with an excellent production designer who has taught me so much about that. I’ve taken those lessons back to the houses I work on give myself a little more room to create atmosphere, especially when faced with more challenging, less engaging spaces.
DG: When you see a photo of a room in a catalog or interiors magazine, do you think about how it’s been styled? What do you notice that a layperson wouldn’t?
AF: I can’t look at magazines or catalogs without noticing how they’re styled. I hardly look at the products in catalogs. In fact, I’m usually looking at the objects that aren’t for sale. Similarly, in magazines, I’m looking for those small touches that give the space personality. I also look at not only what is in the photo, but also how it’s placed, and why that composition works.
The DG Dozen
1) How do you define glamour?
Glamour is a magic combination of confidence, beauty, and ease that create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The word always conjures a flash of light in my mind’s eye… whether it be flashbulbs, the sparkle of a diamond, the sheen of beautiful fabric, or just that glint in the eye of someone at ease with themselves. But I also think that glamour is something ascribed, not inherent. Things are only glamorous because someone else thinks they are.
2) Who or what is your glamorous icon?
Alexander McQueen. A very good friend of mine gave me a book of his work for my birthday, and while I knew of him and some of his work, I was impressed/amazed by the range and drama and sophistication of what I saw from start to finish.
3) Is glamour a luxury or a necessity?
For basic survival glamour is a luxury, but like the fine arts, it’s an unknown quantity that can’t be measured or explained, yet somehow makes life more enjoyable.
4) Favorite glamorous movie?
Auntie Mame. The interiors of her apartment are just amazing. In fact, it was those sets that got me interested in interior design. If I could pick just a scene from a movie, it would be the “Ascot Gavotte” scene from My Fair Lady. The amazing black-and-white dresses and hats against the simple, white, paper-like buildings (all dreamed up by Cecil Beaton) along with the stilted movements and poses are just brilliant.
5) What was your most glamorous moment?
When I was working for a magazine in Los Angeles we hosted a tour of the Case Study houses in Pacific Palisades, which was amazing enough, but in the evening they opened up the Eames house and lit up the lawn with strings of lights. I stood there taking in the crisp night air coming in off the ocean and thinking that I never could have dreamed I’d be there, yet there I was.
Not any one specifically, but an old house filled with lots of history.
8) Most glamorous job?
Is there a glamorous job? I think there are a lot of jobs that seem glamorous, but that’s because we don’t do them. If something looks easy and glamorous, it’s probably because there’s a lot of hard work behind it.
9) Something or someone that other people find glamorous and you don't
Working in the publishing industry. Like before, it often gets glorified in movies and on TV, and really it’s mostly hard work. Yes, there are moments of fun and excitement—that happens anywhere when you love what you’re doing—but there’s also the other 90 percent of the time that you are working and planning and coordinating to make that moment happen. But even I forget that sometimes.
10) Something or someone that you find glamorous whose glamour is unrecognized.
Space. Not the final frontier, but the absence of stuff. Space to do whatever you want: an empty room, an open field. It can be anything and everything.
As a word glamour is tricky to define. Whether any of us experience something as being glamorous depends on our individual responses. I find Charlize Theron’s hair and makeup wonderfully glamorous in the photo at left, while others may not. I feel certain that the intent was to create a glamorous photograph, but intending something to be perceived as glamorous does not insure we will all respond to it in that way.
In dressing for the Oscars, Theron has made some choices that bombed with most fashion critics. Most people felt that the Christian Dior dress that she wore to the 2010 Oscars looked regrettable on her, and it made many worst-dress lists. The Christian Dior dress (shown at right) that she wore to the 2005 Oscars was panned by some as suitable for a high-school prom, but most loved it, and it has appeared on several lists as one the best Oscar dresses of the decade. When you see a large photograph of her making her entrance onstage in this dress, you can almost imagine that it was chosen knowing what the stage colors and design were going to be. The effect of the dress in relationship to that stage design is stunning.
In a situation when something strikes us as stunningly glamorous, the archaic meaning of glamour as magic or enchantment still seems relevant. What we experience seems to cast a spell on us, and what we perceive seems like an enchantment. Even while under the spell, we may sense that what we are experiencing is in part a transient, artful conjuration, and that everything possible has been done to try to make us feel we are experiencing glamour at its epitome, fully incarnated.
Small wonder this is so difficult to pull off—the slightest incongruity can break the spell of glamour. Oh, but what a delightful experience to have when the enchantment works as planned.
The new issue of Reasoncarries a short item I wrote about politics and glamour. A regular Reason feature, the assignment was to come up with a short, three-item list. It’s not online yet, and the published version was a bit truncated for reasons of space, but here’s what I originally wrote, complete with links not available on paper.
1. Glamorous political figures are rare. Unlike charisma, glamour isn’t a personal quality a politician can possess. It’s a product of imagination that requires mystery and distance, which are hard to maintain in a political environment that prizes familiarity and full disclosure. Glamour also tends to dissipate once you’re in office and have to take specific positions, thereby disillusioning some of your supporters. See Barack Obama.
2. Glamorous policies are common. As a nonverbal form of rhetoric, glamour is one of the most common ways of selling policies, from single-payer health care to the abolition of the income tax — not to mention countless military actions, perhaps the oldest use of glamour in politics. My favorite recent examples, because of the alluring imagery involved, are high-speed rail and wind energy.
3. Political glamour is most seductive when it’s selling systems that promise an escape from complexity and compromise. Whether expressed in full-blown communism, Western European socialism, or American technocracy, the glamour of top-down planning shaped 20th-century politics. F.A. Hayek lamented classical liberalism’s lack of similar Utopian inspiration but, in fact, Ayn Rand was masterful in her use of glamour. She knew not only how to tell a romantic story of struggle and triumph but how to create glamorous snapshots that focused her audience’s yearning for freedom and fellowship. Hence the persistent, if illusory, appeal of recreating Galt’s Gulch [link added for DG] in the real world.
[Soviet propaganda poster "POWERFUL TRANSPORT - THE BASIS FOR DEFENSE CAPABILITY OF THE COUNTRY," 1931, on auction at Swann Galleries February 8, image courtesy of Swann.]
After being dumped by the History Channel and scorned by other skittish networks, The Kennedys miniseries has found a home after all, on the little-known ReelzChannel. The WaPo's Lisa de Moraes has an amusing report.
Buried in The Hollywood Reporter'soriginal article on History's decision to scuttle the show was the news that, in exchange for its discretion, one of the network's parent companies might get access to rare recordings of Jackie Kennedy's voice.
Caroline Kennedy has a book deal with Disney's Hyperion publishing division, which announced in April 2010 that it will publish a collection of previously unreleased interviews with the late Jackie Kennedy timed to the 50th anniversary of the first year of JFK's presidency this fall.
Caroline has agreed to edit the untitled book, write an introduction and to help promote it, including making an appearance on Disney/ABC's Good Morning America, among other outlets. As part of the promotion for the book, Caroline is expected to reveal some of the 6.5 hours of previously unheard audiotapes of the former First Lady that form the basis of the book.
Had the History Channel not bowed to her influence, their mother company would have likely lost out on an another Kennedy venture; a volume containing six and a half hours of hitherto-secret interviews that her mother, Jacqueline, did with worshipful historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1964. The audio book, due out in September, will let you hear Jackie speak in her breathy, Vassar voice about her husband's early campaigns, the Cuban Missile Crisis and “married life in the White House,” according to Hyperion Books.
Considering that Jackie once forbade hagiographer William Manchester from even revealing that she smoked, you have to wonder how much she'll spill. “I seriously doubt that she would open her heart,” says Kennedy biographer Edward Klein. “And, if there's anything remotely embarrassing, I think Caroline would expunge it.”
The Kennedys' glamour is an important income-generating asset, so I, too, doubt we'll be hearing anything revealing. But we will hear something, which in itself is unusual.
One of the world's most photographed women, Jackie mostly let her carefully crafted image speak for her. (Here's a rare photo of Jackie smoking.) Only a few public traces of her voice remain, most of them from the 1960 campaign or White House years. And unlike the graceful photos, they seem dated, calculated, and a little strange.
The most famous, featured at the top of this post, is her White House tour, broadcast on CBS. There she speaks in ingratiatingly tones, masking the fact that she's didactically instructing both her interviewer and the general public, who don't share her high-end taste or her knowledge of decorative arts. By contrast, when interrogating Dr. Benjamin Spock in a 1960 campaign ad, she plays a subtly flirtatious, slightly dim student. In another campaign video, introduced by Myrna Loy, she acts the normal American wife and mother, just like the women watching. "Now I think politics is one of the most rewarding lives a woman can have--to be married to a politician," she affirms.
New recorded interviews promise to undercut Jackie's mystery. Because the recordings date from 1964, when she was still playing the perfect husband's perfect widow, they also threaten the new post-feminist image crafted for her in the recent booksfocusing on her publishing career.
This Kelly bag in Hermès orange is for sale at Decades Inc., the high-end vintage boutique beloved of Hollywood stars and the stylists who dress them. According to the Decades blog, this particular model retails for $9,000 but is available for an undisclosed "below retail" sum. (If you have to ask, you can't afford it.)
The bag got its name when Life ran a photo of Princess Grace, then pregnant with her daughter Caroline, using it to disguise her pregnancy from paparazzi. With its dated combination of large size and short straps, the bag is a holdover from the days of perfectly polished ladies in white gloves who'd never think of flaunting their “bumps.” Yet it’s still considered a timeless classic. Why?
The Kelly bag reminds me of Lisa Fremont, Grace Kelly’s character in Rear Window. It’s rare and expensive. It flaunts its owner’s wealth in a subtle and unapologetic way. But it’s also tough and more adaptable than it initially appears. If Lisa does wind up tramping through the jungle with her true love, the Kelly bag is the sort of purse she might take with her.
The practical effect of this combination of rarity, expense, and toughness is that people can justify spending outrageous amounts on a purse, knowing that it will last indefinitely. It won’t go out of style, because it wasn’t really in style to begin with, and Hermès will refurbish it on request. The per-use cost thus drops substantially, plus there’s a secondary market in case you need the cash.
Note that it’s called the Kelly bag, even though Grace was married when the name was coined. It’s not associated with royalty but with Kelly’s on-screen persona.
Last week Southern California teens with chronic kidney disease had a chance to experience one of the joys of prom season: picking out the perfect dress.
In preparation for next Sunday's Renal Teen Prom (see earlier post here), volunteers from the Renal Support Network fanned out around Southern California, bringing donated prom dresses to hospitals and dialysis centers. They set up makeshift dresing rooms in any available space, from exam rooms to restrooms to janitor's closets, allowing delighted girls to browse and try on dresses (with advice and assistance from assorted moms).
This year's prom dress selection was better than ever, thanks to donations from DG friends at TJX (TJ Maxx/Marshall's) and Out of the Closet. TJX rushed their dresses overnight so they could arrive in time to become the caravan's most popular items when it hit Millers Children's Hospital in Long Beach, where RSN volunteer Robert Ziegler took these photos.
RSN accepts dress donations year-round. You can send them directly to 1311 N. Maryland Avenue, Glendale, CA 91207 or, if you prefer, drop them off with DG friend Marina, owner of the fantastic First Class Tailors in Brentwood. You can also make a financial contribution via PayPal--$50 sends one teen to the prom.
The prom could still use a volunteer videographer who can work next Sunday evening, January 16, at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks. For more information, please contact RSN directly or leave a comment below.
Someday someone may see a picture of you and likely smile or laugh when they realize that you were wearing your hair in the fashion of the age, most likely inspired by your favorite actor or singer. I offer as evidence this picture of my maternal great-grandfather and great-grandmother and their children. All of the women are wearing the 1920s-fashionable Marcel wave. With the string of pearls all of them probably felt as up-to-date as film star Mary Pickford, shown below with the same look (except that Mary smiles and dares to bare her shoulders). My grandfather, the only male offspring, has his hair slicked back in the fashion of Rudolph Valentino.
Looking at high-school and college yearbooks from a few decades gives us the perspective to see just how conformist we sometimes can be. My wife laughs when she sees that most of her friends were wearing the same hair style that she was. Many of the boys in my high school wore some version of Elvis Presley’s or James Dean’s hair, hoping somehow that their charisma would magically transfer to us.
Tina Fey has admitted having a girl crush on Dorothy Hamill (shown here receiving an Olympic skating medal). Fey got a Hamill-style haircut, plus wore a big Dorothy Hamill button. Hamill’s wedge cut flowed so beautifully when she skated that some commentators have lamented the lack of something similar at the last Winter Olympics.
How about DG readers? What actor, singer, or athlete had the glamorous hair that you and many classmates aspired to? For inspiration, here’s a site showing many 20th-century hairstyles, and another showing 10 of the most popular hairstyles.
The couple at left have turned to face each other. This small detail is actually part of a pattern of cues that reveals that this couple has formed or is in the process of trying to form a relationship.
A few nights ago I observed a mother and father taking their college-age daughter out to dinner. (The mother and daughter had identical noses.) Also at the table was another young woman, perhaps the daughter’s roommate. After observing them briefly, I told my wife that I suspected the two young women might be more than roommates. Just as my wife glanced over, the two young women seemed to casually decide to compare hand sizes, but the particular way they touched their fingertips together certainly looked like a gesture of affection. My wife thought so, and the mother studied that gesture closely. The father seemed oblivious.
We remain, inescapably, biological creatures. We take in some information through our senses that we process unconsciously. A recent article in Psychology Today discusses some studies which support the “leaky cues hypothesis” that a woman would find it difficult to fully conceal all signs that she is currently fertile. Simply smelling a T-shirt recently worn by a woman in estrus caused a spike in men’s testosterone levels. A study done of lap dancers revealed that they earned almost twice as much in tips while in estrus. There are also subtle changes to a woman’s voice, face, and figure during her fertile days. Subjects shown photographs of the same woman taken over the course of a month pick the photo taken during her fertile period as the most attractive. The article also discusses subtle changes to women’s behavior during their menstrual cycle, including what type of men they may find most attractive.
Interactive visual cues, like the one I described between the roommates, can be studied by observation. In Sex Signals: The Biology of Love, biologist Timothy Perper published research based on thousands of hours spent observing interactions between men and women in places like bars and dance halls. His observation teams discovered that women used predictable patterns of visual and tactile cues to signal a man that they would be receptive to his attention. These “contact-ready” cues were so subtle most men weren’t consciously aware of receiving them, even when they responded to them.
Perper’s research found that about 90% of women were aware that women sent such cues and could spot other women giving them, whereas only about 5 to 10% of men were consciously aware of them. To eliminate gender bias in their observations, Perper’s observers worked in teams of one man and one woman. Perper discovered that some men could not be trained to be attentive observers because they would avoid seeing women do anything that challenged the common belief that men initiate most male/female relationships. These reluctant trainees would manage to glance away at just at the moment a woman sent a subtle cue—such as touching the clothing that the man was wearing, a gesture that other teams had observed was a cue that she would accept a reciprocal touch.
Perper notes that a woman sends such cues with the unstated provision that at any point she can indicate that she is no longer interested in the man’s attention. He is then expected to withdraw (which most men seemed to understand and respect, even though a few became unwelcomely persistent). The research teams observed something similar in the pattern of male responses. When a woman began to give a man a pattern of cues, they discovered that even if he showed initial interest, if at any later point he failed to make an appropriate reciprocal response to her cue, she might as well give up on him. For example, the turn to face the other person (illustrated by the first photo) is usually initiated by the woman, and he is expected to turn toward her in response. If he doesn’t, any further efforts to engage his attention will usually fail.
Much human behavior goes unnoticed. In his book Stein On Writing, Sol Stein recounts a lesson in observation he received from playwright Thorton Wilder:
He [Wilder] took me to watch a country square dance from an unoccupied balcony in a recreation hall, and pointed out things that writers are supposed to see. The New Hampshire folk came to dances in families—mothers, fathers, and adolescent children. As we watched from the balcony, Wilder pointed out the barely noticeable sexual interplay between fathers and daughters and mothers and sons as they danced the evening away....Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence.
After reading Perper’s book I decided to train myself to be more observant. I read some other books on non-verbal communication (sometimes called “non-verbal leakage”), and thereafter people watching became endlessly fascinating. In restaurants I could spot a couple across the room having a quiet disagreement from cues in their body language, such as crossing their arms in front of them. At a sidewalk cafe I was amused to watch a poised, sophisticated woman deftly use body language to seem to defer to her less poised male companion about where to eat. In a casual restaurant I became deeply uncomfortable watching a teenage daughter in short shorts stand next to her father’s chair so that he could rub the back of her upper thigh, unseen by his wife sitting across from them.
Occasionally Perper’s observation teams were perplexed by what they saw. If so, and the opportunity presented itself, they might introduce themselves and ask. Seeing a group of women and a man have lunch, one team thought they were picking up signals between the man and one of the women, but weren’t sure. The woman whose signals perplexed them lingered after lunch, and they approached her, explained their research, and asked her about the situation. She laughed and told them that she was having an affair with the man, who was married, and they were trying to keep it secret. It obviously becomes harder to keep relationships secret from people trained to notice small details of interaction.
Some adeptness in reading non-verbal cues is unquestionable useful, and numerous commentators and educators have expressed concern that Generation-Y seems even less adept at it than their elders. Many commentators suggest that a fascination with the wonders of internet social networking has meant that many teenagers are failing to gain enough experience learning to read the information conveyed by subtle facial and body cues. Some people feel they are also less adept at managing their their own non-verbal information. For example, some teachers report that many of their current students are less able to look them in the eye, and often seem less skillful at face-to-face lying. In some face-to-face business and interpersonal situations, it can be important to mask non-verbal leakage. Being too easy to read can sometimes reveal more to others than you intend, and place you at a disadvantage.
Addendum: 1/1/2011. In response to a request, I’ve listed a few books on relevant topics in the comments.
[Yes or No? photo by malias. Disagreement photo by Ed Yourdon. Both are use under the Flickr Creative Commons License.]
DeepGlamour explores the magic of glamour in its many manifestations, from movies, fashion, advertising, and cars to real estate, politics, sports, and travel.
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. The book includes some remarkable geometric models (such as the one shown at right) which he uses to argue that despite various stylistic differences, there are enough commonalities in Western tonal music from the late Middle Ages to the present to consider it an “extended common practice.” 
, chronicles the rise and fall of different sorts of fur as the symbols of feminine luxury, particularly in Britain. Particularly interesting is the way mink suddenly replaced fox after World War II:
, who with Edith Head is probably the most famous Hollywood costume designer. What makes his work particularly significant?
. Davis writes, “For the screen, clothes, above all, must be photogenic. Comfort and practicality were of little concern. Many of [Adrian’s] gowns were too tight for actresses to sit in, requiring them to recline on ‘leaning boards’ between takes.”
, which uses economic signaling theory to analyze Renaissance patrons’ motivations and techniques. That fact: “By the time he commissioned the fresco, Sassetti had nearly run the Geneva branch of the Medici bank into bankruptcy.” Oops. Maybe the portraits were meant as a distraction or damage control. How could you fire (or worse) a man who had sponsored such fine pictures of your kids?
). Why go to a lot of effort to wrap a gift when the wrapping is just going to be torn off?
, an extremely interesting and provocative book that ties glamour (my word, not his) to the origins of the consumer society and the puzzle of open-ended economic growth. Here's the video:
A very good friend of mine gave me a book of his work for my birthday, and while I knew of him and some of his work, I was impressed/amazed by the range and drama and sophistication of what I saw from start to finish.
. The interiors of her apartment are just amazing. In fact, it was those sets that got me interested in interior design. If I could pick just a scene from a movie, it would be the “Ascot Gavotte” scene from 
. The amazing black-and-white dresses and hats against the simple, white, paper-like buildings (all dreamed up by 
focusing on her publishing career.
. It’s rare and expensive. It flaunts its owner’s wealth in a subtle and unapologetic way. But it’s also tough and more adaptable than it initially appears. If Lisa does wind up tramping through the jungle with her true love, the Kelly bag is the sort of purse she might take with her.
, biologist Timothy Perper published research based on thousands of hours spent observing interactions between men and women in places like bars and dance halls. His observation teams discovered that women used predictable patterns of visual and tactile cues to signal a man that they would be receptive to his attention. These “contact-ready” cues were so subtle most men weren’t consciously aware of receiving them, even when they responded to them. 
, Sol Stein recounts a lesson in observation he received from playwright Thorton Wilder:
affiliate. Virginia Postrel receives a percentage of the purchase price on anything you buy through one of our 
links, including purchases you make while on 
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