Fashion and Glamoura theatrical construct designed to entice an audience. Consequently, it offered
the most powerful and seductive form of glamour and the Hollywood film
star became the most glamorous figure to have existed.
The Nineteenth-Century CityAt the root of glamour, however, is a set of social and cultural changes that
took place in the late nineteenth century, in particular in the great modern
cities. Broadly speaking, this period may be said to have seen the decline of
rigid social hierarchies and the eclipse of aristocratic control of culture, politics
and society. Instead, a civilization based on money took shape, in which
luxury, visibility and elegance were not reserved for a closed elite, but were
open to whoever could pay or be paid for. Increasingly, a cosmopolitan
category of nouveaux riches bought into the old high society or, where access
was obstructed, emulated its forms and rituals. As part of this process,
monetary values of ostentation and display enjoyed prominence as indus-
trialists and financiers struggled to establish their status through conspicuous
consumption. At the same time, a range of secondary changes served to render
more open and visible the public dimension of the life of the elite, which
took on the characteristics of a tableau or narrative for lower social classes.
For example, the theatre and high society enjoyed closer relations, and both
for the first time in the modern period established links with the street, which
was redefined as a place of shopping and display. In Paris, Benjamin’s ‘capital
of the nineteenth century’, the boulevards,^29 the arcades and the theatres of
Montmartre became centres of frivolity and luxury that were not hidden
behind the closed doors of the palaces of the aristocracy.
In such a context, dazzling facades produced by families and individuals
seeking to win recognition mingled and mixed with commercial displays,
the bustle of the boulevards and the gaiety of the world of entertainment.
Enticing images became part and parcel of the modern city. What were the
sources of this new visual language of display? In part they were conventional
ones. Royal courts, like that of the French Second Empire prior to its downfall,
or the events of the London Season, provided a focus of attention. But as an
established elite lost its monopoly of splendour, the sources were widened to
include the demi-monde or what eventually was termed ‘café society’. Among
the low cultural forms that provided inputs into the dynamic image of the
city were popular theatre, the cafés chantants, the display windows of the
- Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,