Glamour

Virginia Postrel is the insightful author of a number of works of cultural analysis, including The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness and The FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress . Leslie Camhi reviews her latest, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion in the current issue of NYTBR . Postrel wants to formulate a theory “that explains, in her words, ‘how Jackie Kennedy is like the Chrysler Building or a sports car like a Moleskine notebook, or why some audiences might find glamour in nuns, wind turbines or Star Trek.”

Postrel distinguishes between style and beauty, which are about people and objects, and glamor, which she claims is “inherent in our perception. One of the main components of glamor, she says, is mystery:

“Mystery one of its central components distinguishes glamour from its close cousin, charisma, defined here as the personal magnetism that can inspire other people to follow a cause. But death puts an end to a persons charisma, while it can magnify her glamour exponentially (think of Joan of Arc or Evita Pern). Most important, for Postrel, glamour is an illusion ‘known to be false but felt to be true’ a deceptive image of grace springing from an emotionally authentic longing, and capable of inspiring real-world effects, whether a ballet dancers leap or a jihadi terrorists bomb.”

Glamor is of a pieece with the “rise of the ‘society of the spectacle,’ to borrow the French theorist Guy Debords term the congregation of masses of people in urban centers, alongside a burgeoning news media spreading images and ideas, and a proliferation of luxury goods made possible by a newly industrial society. Postrel takes issue with the class-based (and, as she sees it, moralizing) approach of previous scholars, including two Englishmen the influential art critic John Berger and (more recently) the cultural historian Stephen Gundle who see glamour as the product of social envy (Berger) and as presenting an escapist fantasy of upward mobility (Gundle). Glamour is certainly escapist, she writes, but it doesnt dull the senses, as would an escape into drug addiction, for example. Rather, for better or for worse, glamour intensifies longing, fosters hope and stokes ambition.”