The Fashion Businessmanufactured in series like Ford cars. Sometimes, the objectification of the
star, especially where the personality was weak and the elements of ‘type’
strong, resulted in a sense that the objects had taken over. For example, there
are some photographs of Lana Turner taken in the 1940s which depict her
coiffed, made up and adorned in every conceivable fashion accessory: hat,
gloves, fur stole, brooch, earrings.^25 The human element appears to have
disappeared almost completely.
There is something standardized about all the icons of glamour produced
during the Hollywood golden age. Like shop mannequins and the fashion
models of more recent times, their blankness and apparent hollowness leaves
a space which enables people to ‘buy into’ them and project themselves and
their aspirations on to them. While upper-class and established middle-class
people regarded Hollywood as vulgar, brash and impossibly nouveau, lower-
class people viewed it as the epitome of refinement. Certainly, it was a great
educator, with its stories of physical and social mobility, its encouragements
to self-transformation and its mail order catalogue aesthetics. Yet, Elizabeth
Wilson has pointed out that star images are frequently characterized by an
air of the haunting and the unnatural.^26 So still and lifeless are the composed
images that their subjects appear almost embalmed and laid to rest.
The capacity of capitalism for reification, for turning everything, even
people, into things was first noted by Gyorgy Lukacs in 1923.^27 It can be
argued that the de-humanized, dead look that marks glamour proves its
intrinsic link to urban, industrial society. Divorced from nature, this society
poses the transcendence of nature as an objective. For the first time,
abundance was configured as a real possibility by industry. ‘Consumerism
posed nature as an inhospitable force, a hopeless anachronism,’ write the
Ewens. ‘Industrial production and enterprising imaginations claimed for
themselves the rights and powers of creation.’^28 Because these forces were
developed most fully in the United States, so too is glamour a phenomenon
that in its purest form can be analysed through the prism of Americanism.
The level of abstraction required could be developed most easily in the context
of a country that was itself invented and unburdened by the weight of the
past. Within the context of America, Hollywood was the maximum expression
of the artificial, a community created in the middle of nowhere and dedicated
to fiction. The lives of the stars, no less than the backlot, was a staged reality,
- See Fahey, David, and Rich, Linda (eds), Masters of Starlight: Photographers in
Hollywood, New York: Ballantine, 1987, p. 159. - Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago, 1985.
- Lukacs, Gyorgy, History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin, 1977.
- Ewen, Stuart and Ewen, Elizabeth, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping
of American Consciousness, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, p. 47.