The Fashion Businessin which dozens of young men and women were groomed and moulded into
glittering ideal-types whose fortune, beauty, spending power and exciting
lives dazzled the film-going public. Writing in 1939 about American film
stars, Margaret Thorp defined glamour as ‘sex appeal plus luxury plus
elegance plus romance’. ‘The place to study glamour today is the fan
magazines,’ she noted. ‘Fan magazines are distilled as stimulants of the most
exhilarating kind. Everything is superlative, surprising, exciting... Nothing
ever stands still, nothing ever rests, least of all the sentences... Clothes of
course are endlessly pictured and described usually with marble fountains,
private swimming pools or limousines in the background... Every aspect of
life, trivial and important, should be bathed in the purple glow of publicity.’^13
Neither of these seems to us to be persuasive as a starting point for the
analysis of glamour, although both, with their common emphasis on image
and spectacle, are important components of any examination of the pheno-
menon. Hollywood, in particular, as the most systematic producer of
glamorous images in the twentieth century, requires analysis if the functioning
of glamour in contemporary commercial culture is to be understood. Before
embarking on this, however, let us set out our own definition of the
phenomenon. Glamour, it may be argued, is an enticing image, a staged and
constructed image of reality that invites consumption. That is to say, it is
primarily visual, it consists of a retouched or perfected version of a real person
or situation and it is predicated upon the gaze of a desiring audience. The
subjects of glamour, which may be things or people (usually reified through
a process of manufacture), seduce by association with one or more of the
following qualities (the more the better): beauty, sexuality, theatricality,
wealth, dynamism, notoriety, leisure. To this list might be added the feminine,
because display and consumption have been heavily connoted as feminine
since at least the nineteenth century. Femininity moreover is often considered
to be a masquerade, the construction of an image that matches cultural
expectations. As Basinger observes, ‘a woman is her fashion and glamour,
rather than her work’.^14
- Farrand Thorp, Margaret, America at the Movies, New Haven, Conn., 1939. Quoted
in Richards, Jeffrey, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain 1930–1939,
London: Routledge, 1984, pp. 157–8. - Basinger, Jeanine, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930–1960,
London: Chatto and Windus, 1994, p. 129.