The Fashion Businessaccounts fashion and glamour are taken to be synonymous. Jeanine Basinger
takes this view in her analysis of classical Hollywood cinema and its
female audiences. However, she also states that ‘Glamour goes beyond mere
fashion. Although the concept of glamour includes fashion, it ultimately
involves more than what a woman puts on her body. It deals with the lady
herself.’^3 The movie stars she refers to usually occupied a median position
between the two poles identified by Scott, thus rendering his differentiation
meaningless.
In the context of such confusion, an attempt to identify what glamour is,
where it comes from and how it works is surely timely. In this chapter three
moments of glamour will be explored. In keeping with glamour’s associations
with the immediate and the commercial, the first of these will be the present.
Older meanings will be considered in relation to contemporary uses in the
press and advertising. Second, the root of many of the gestures and stereotypes
of modern glamour – Hollywood cinema of the middle decades of the
twentieth century – will be examined. In the final section, consideration will
be given to the transformation of the nineteenth-century city which, it will
be argued, was the original site of glamour as it is used and understood today.
Contemporary GlamourThe term glamour is employed continuously in connection with fashion,
showbusiness and entertainment, beauty and beauty marketing and the social
worlds that are determined by, or associated with, these industries. It is
scarcely possible to open a copy of Marie Claire,Vogue or Hello! without
finding the word used to underline the allure of an occasion, a dwelling, a
product or a person. Even the broadsheets make use of the word’s evocative
power in presenting leisure, fashion and entertainment features. In all these
publications, glamour is used primarily, although by no means exclusively,
in association with the public presentation of fashion. The ‘fashion weeks’
of London, Paris, Milan and New York give rise to ample coverage of runway
shows by leading designers which are conceived precisely to capture press
and media attention. The concentration of designer brands, fabulous frocks,
name models and celebrity guests, all under the glare of publicity and fêted
with lavish hospitality, amounts to an irresistible cocktail of all that is
desirable in contemporary commercial culture. The pre-eminence often given
- Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960,
London: Chatto and Windus, 1994, p. 137.