The Fashion Businesscontemporary images of glamour tend to work off other images, creating a
self-referential cycle that reinforces artificiality. The original social referents
have become lost in time.
In the opening section, we offered our definition of glamour. In conclusion,
it is appropriate to ask if it is possible to construct a theory. Any theory
would have to take account of the imaginative appeal of glamour, its
seductiveness and artificiality. It would also need to refer to persistent class
divisions, the alienation of modern capitalism and the frustrations as well as
the temptations of consumer culture. Although a great deal of work has been
undertaken in recent years on consumerism, fashion, photography and the
media, there is not as yet any theory of glamour. It may be suggested that
early sociologists like Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen and
Siegfried Kracauer still have much to offer. Their contribution is important
because they were writing about luxury, fashion, conspicuous consumption
and cinema towards the end of the moment that has been identified here as
having witnessed the birth of glamour. Perhaps the most important starting
point, however, is Walter Benjamin’s concept of the decline of the aura of art
in the age of mechanical reproduction.^35 Through reproduction, art may
gain commercial potential, he argued, but it loses authenticity. Something
similar can be sustained in relation to high society or fashion. Rita Felski
argues that even woman loses her aura in an era of technical reproduction
since femininity as nature is demystified and downgraded.^36 These ideas stem
at root from Marx’s theory of labour and value in capitalist society. The
problem is that, without aura, imagination is impoverished and commercial
potential is undermined. Glamour therefore is the manufactured aura of
capitalist society, the dazzling illusion that compensates for inauthenticity
and which reinforces consumerism as a way of life.
- Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in
Illuminations London: Fontana, 1973. - Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,