The Fashion Businessher relationships, including in 2000 the hint of a liaison with Prince Andrew,
have been carefully staged and widely reported.^8
Caprice appeals because she is an invented personality. In reality she is
not a socialite, but a brightly-packaged vehicle for individual dreams and
aspirations. As a product she can exist only in the world of the media, where
the values she embodies are highly regarded and well-rewarded. Her surface
image and shallowness ensure that she conserves certain general qualities
that allow people to identify with her. She offers herself as a perfected version
of the ordinary woman, while at the same time, through advertising and
advice columns, promising to assist women to improve themselves.
Even brief consideration of an example such as Caprice enables us to
identify the elements which go to make up what everyone would recognize
today as glamour: fashionably attractive, a polished, slightly unreal appear-
ance, physically and sexually appealing, mysterious origins, a touch of the
exotic, highly visible. Glamour, in short, seems to be a quality which is rooted
to some extent in the real but which is largely manufactured and which exists
in the realm of that second-order reality that is sustained by and in the mass
media. As a quality that is intended to fascinate a mass audience, it is not
very subtle and, indeed, might be said to verge on bad taste. An example of
this may be seen in the magazine Take a Break. In a story published in June
1995, two women who had paid for a photograph of themselves after a
‘Hollywood makeover’ lamented the fact that, far from achieving the
sophistication they had dreamed of, they seemed like ‘a couple of tarts’.^9
Ignoring the sexual and showy elements that are always present in glamour,
they had aspired to the polished, confident look so frequently found in
upmarket women’s magazines.
In order to render these notions more precise, let us examine dictionary
definitions of the term. Despite the vagueness of its usage, the etymology of
glamour is reasonably clear. According to The New Fowler’s Modern English
Usage (1996) the word was originally Scottish. It was an alteration of the
word grammar that retained the sense of the old word gramarye (‘occult
learning, magic, necromancy’). The Oxford English Dictionary (1989) also
highlights its Scottish origins and derivation from grammar, although this is
indicated to mean magic, enchantment and spells rather than necromancy
and the occult. According to Fowler’s, glamour passed into standard English
usage around the 1830s with the meaning of ‘a delusive or alluring charm’.
- See Alison Boshoff, ‘The Prince and the Show-Off Girl’,Daily Mail, 24 February 2000,
pp. 24–5. - Joanne Richardson, ‘We Look Like a Couple of Tarts’,Take a Break, 22 June 1995, p.