The Fashion BusinessCharles Rearick observes, ‘this one catered to a taste for skilfully wrought
realism in illusion and a burgeoning touristic desire to see the most touted
sites quickly and easily.’^34
Boldini’s work is interesting not just because many of his subjects featured
in the press but because he developed a standardized and codified visual
language of allure at the very beginning of the media age. Although the public
that was interested in and familiar with his art was quite restricted, the related
dynamics of celebrity and the popular press were contributing to a marked
widening of the potential audience. The development of photographic
reproduction and the illustrated press fuelled this trend. With the invention
ofVogue in United States in the 1890s (and European editions in following
years), the café society became a systematic phenomenon sustained by the
media and commercial culture. In contrast to aloof and private members of
the old social elite, actors, playboys, courtesans, financiers and young
aristocrats were happy to disport themselves before the public gaze. They
thus offered a facade of elite life that the public could relate to more easily
because it was not based purely on class and inheritance.
This development coincided with the expansion of consumer culture.
Department stores, the cosmetics industry and advertising drew on innova-
tions in the arts but they also gave a new impulse to glamour. For marketing
purposes, they cultivated royal and aristocratic patronage while also seeking
to entice customers with a phantasmagoria of plenty. Bright colours, seductive
atmospheres, exotic décor and theatrical razzamataz were employed as
techniques to transport shoppers into a realm of fantasy where goods became
symbols of values that were as much imaginative as utilitarian. Stores, like
theatres, were open to the public, yet they also traded in exclusivity. Many
were built like palaces, staff acted like servants and customers treated as
honoured guests. From the 1920s, cinemas too presented themselves as
people’s palaces, where luxury was combined with democracy. The purpose
of such techniques was to create appropriate spaces for the selling of luxury
goods but also, crucially, to invest ordinary goods with associations of luxury
and desirability. In this way they could be sold for premium prices. In fashion
and cosmetics, glamour still serves precisely this purpose today.
Originally forged in the great capital cities of Europe, the commercial
language of allure fed directly into Hollywood cinema. Between the 1910s
and the 1930s, numerous cosmeticians, retail experts and window designers
left a politically turbulent Europe for the United States. Several ended up in
movie studio art departments. One of these was Ernest Dichter who, having
- Rearick, Charles, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985, pp. 172–3.