Key Elements of Glamour, Part One: Mystery
Glamour is often aided and abetted by silence. But why?
You might have heard recently that glamour is dead.
I understand why people say this. In day to day life, people have never seemed more casual or less put together. It’s not unusual to see people wearing Crocs and weed leaf patterned pajama pants in the airport. I saw this recently. But I’ve also seen people dress like this at my local tavern. It’s cool to be careless, or perhaps it’s some weird post-traumatic hangover from the darkest days of the you-know-what. I think a lot of people are stuck in the freeze response, because they will appear this way in public as a matter of course. That isn’t how it used to be.
On the cultural front, now every celebrity has a podcast where they openly discuss what they bicker about with their husbands and wives. They tell us how often they skip showers. Social media allows them to tell us whatever they’re thinking about in real time. Their personal revelations (“I got Botox and I hated it!”) provide content for gossip blogs and magazines. Being relatable is the name of the game, even if celebrities actually live a very different kind of life than the rest of us. (I do not have an imperious Swedish personal trainer named Magnus who forces me to do 45 minutes on the assault bike every day. I wish I did.)
At the same time, we know that it isn’t real, at least on some level. The pantomime of relatability that celebrities engage in is just as calculated as the old way of doing things. No matter how many times they tell us that they, too, could eat an entire bag of Tim’s jalapeno chips in one sitting, we know that they also have an imperious Swedish personal trainer named Magnus who will swat the potato chip bag out of their hands. We know this because celebrities look the way they look, and you can only look like that with Magnus’ help. It’s just that now, “relatable” is the standard to which famous people are held.
But the standard used to be mystery.
And when people say that glamour is dead, this is often what they mean. Mystery is a necessary-but-insufficient quality required for you to experience the feeling of yearning that we call glamour. In other words, all glamorous things are mysterious. But not all mysterious things are glamorous. As far as I know, Virginia Postrel is the first person to explicitly make the connection between glamour and mystery. I’d like to explore it further. To unpack what mystery means in this context, we will explore mystery as it’s expressed in visual mediums. And we will explore mystery as a quality found in people. We’ll examine why it makes glamour possible, and we’ll uncover why glamour is so fragile in the Internet Age.
Part 1: Mystery as a Visual Element
Mystery is often found in the very composition of an image. Sometimes it’s easier to project onto someone whose face you cannot see. They could be literally turned away from the camera or the face can be hidden in other ways. You’ll often see this kind of mystery used in advertising. The fact that you can’t see the person’s face makes them simply a stand-in for you. You can imagine yourself in their place, in your dream Parisian apartment, or wearing your new favorite shoes, or on a brand new mountain bike. Why do you think mannequins in department stores don’t have faces? So that you can imagine yourself in the clothes instead. A variation of this kind of mystery is when the subject’s eyes are averted or looking elsewhere. Direct-to-camera can be too intimate.
This could be you.
The subject in the image can also have some kind of translucent covering, like sunglasses, or a veil. The use of shadow, either to partially obscure the person, or to obscure their surroundings, is common. Translucence is important because it both allows people in and holds them at a remove at the same time. Sunglasses fit this brief perfectly. They’re not entirely opaque but they conceal one of the most expressive parts of the face.
Sunglasses are like the MSG of glamour—an instant shortcut with maximum impact. Unless they’re, like, aviators that make you look like a narc. Or the polarized ones that I’m told people wear in the Inland Empire.
Glamour is most often experienced when we behold still images. An advertisement, an artwork, or a photograph–they’re all inert. They capture one moment, one mood. That’s one reason why the icons of the mid century remain such potent totems of glamour. Unless you’re like me and you’ve seen a lot of movies from the time, you only know James Dean, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, or Dorothy Dandridge from photographs.
The use of dramatic lighting creates shadows that intensify Dorothy’s allure. Her glamour is also heightened by her distance from us in time.
The other reason why the celebrities from Hollywood’s Golden Age remain uniquely glamorous is the power of the studio system—and its attendant press machine. The studios could shape their stars’ backstories…and they could also hush up the fact that Spencer Tracy drunkenly drove his car into a building. Compared to the hyper-surveillance we live with now (social media, smartphones, CCTV, the internet), these celebrities were less exposed. There was less information about them accessible to you, period–even if you read the fan magazines or Hedda Hopper’s column. So if you know anything about James Dean or Dorothy Dandridge, it’s likely that they suffered early, inauspicious deaths...and not much else. You can find out more about them, you can read books and listen to podcasts about them and watch their films, but compared to how much stuff is on the internet about what Florence Pugh eats for breakfast, they’re much more mysterious.
As a result, figures from the past can easily be avatars of your Fantasy Self. But when someone becomes too familiar to you–if you engage in the one-sided intimacy of a parasocial relationship with them–mystery disappears. With it, so does the ability to transfer your desires onto them so cleanly, because they are too well-defined as people. They can’t be symbols anymore. Which brings us to part two.
Part 2: Mystery As an Attitude in the Age of Oversharing
And a brief side quest into mystery as it pertains to branding.
We’ve gone over mystery as a component of visual composition. But mystery is also an attitude, or a communications strategy if you want to get corporate about it. This kind of mystery is necessary for people (and probably brands, as such) to be glamorous when we encounter them beyond the bounds of the still image. Remember, glamour is the experience of connecting with your Fantasy Self, your subconscious desires, because you encounter a person, object, concept, or image that symbolizes those desires. And it’s easier to project your own subconscious desires onto someone about whom you know very little. If you’ve ever fallen in love, you know what I mean.
This goes against everything that I’m trained to do as a marketing professional. Instead, we’re taught: Be authentic! Be vulnerable! Share your brand story! Declare your values! Connect! With! Your! Audience! Etc etc. But authenticity as a marketing strategy, and glamour as a marketing strategy, are not necessarily incompatible. I think they usually belong in different stages of the customer journey (I hate the term “marketing funnel.” It’s so quotidian).
Furthermore, you can only construct glamorous product imagery/brand collateral/ads if you deeply understand your audience’s true desires. Glamour is like a two way mirror. You’re on the transparent side of the glass, and you see your customer very clearly. You understand what they’re looking for. But they are on the shiny side of the glass, looking in the mirror, and you only show them an idealized version of themselves. You’ve smudged some Vaseline on the mirror to soften their flaws and amplify their beauty. Would you rather the two-way mirror be a window? Would you rather have them see you? Does that make sense for the product you’re selling, how expensive it is, or the associations you want them to have with your brand? Just something to think about.
The other thing we must acknowledge is the dominance (read: tyranny) of social media and the way it has changed the very nature of celebrity. I know that mystery is an insanely counter-cultural idea in our current time. We live in an age where everyone is encouraged to open up, be forthcoming, tell everyone everything.
But then we are confronted with the uncomfortable reality that the celebrities we want to idealize–actors, pop stars, musicians, models, fashion designers, fancy business people, athletes–are so frustratingly human. They were just as human and error prone in the mid-century, of course–think of Frank Sinatra getting embroiled in scandals because he punched a reporter in the face or was maybe* involved in some kind of Mafia Crime Summit in Havana–but “Golden Age” celebrities usually weren’t going out of their way to dismantle their own public image. They didn’t have social media, or the internet, so they couldn’t post something outrageously stupid or offensive on Instagram. They could go to Louella Parsons to get their side of the story out, sure, but Louella was still writing it, not them. We didn’t demand for them to speak up on this or that hot button topic, and then get disappointed when they bungle the details, because they are not educated in foreign policy. Our expectations of how celebrities should behave were different. And it was easier to maintain illusions then. Now, illusions (glamour being one of them) are as fragile as Elon Musk’s ego.
Mystery is counter-cultural, but if that’s the case, then so is privacy. If you want to be glamorous, be extremely selective what you share, and with whom. This will also have the added benefit of forcing people to take you seriously, because whenever you do speak out, it stands out. (As an aside: The greatest hoodwinking of our age is that social media companies convinced us that it’s healthy to share everything. We can see, twenty years into the current paradigm, that this is an abject lie. If it were the case that sharing on social media were good for us, then it would not be creating skyrocketing levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness in young people, who use it the most. The culture of oversharing benefits Instagram and TikTok as corporations far more than it ever benefits us personally.)
Part 3: A Case Study of Mystery As It Relates To Glamour
And why influencers might be pretty good at this—sometimes.
Click through the carousel above and notice that Barbara’s face is partially or totally obscured in most of the photos.
To sum up: Mystery allows us to project our own desires and identity onto the glamorous object. It allows us to dream of taking the place of that person, doing that thing, living that kind of life. Let’s look at one of my Fantasy Selves: the Danish influencer Barbara Kristoffersen. She has about 690k followers on Instagram, and her presence there is soothingly superficial. She’s just like a bunch of other influencers. You’ll be familiar with her content if you’ve spent more thein five minutes on Instagram at any point in the last ten years. But she often doesn’t show her face in photos. Her cheerful, short captions give nothing away as to what she’s really like. So when I engage with her content, I can imagine myself as a lovely, naturally blonde, naturally tan, shapely young woman traveling in the Maldives wearing pastel pink bikinis. I can imagine a life of matcha lattes and pilates in Copenhagen, a life free from worrying about things like my medical debt. I would really like to move to Copenhagen someday, which I realize is very basic! My point is that Barbara’s way of presenting herself to the world allows me to imagine myself in her place. Therefore I can consciously understand some of my heart’s desires. I can’t move to Copenhagen yet, but I can have a leisurely matcha latte at a local coffee shop, and wear a cute hair clip as I do it.
But maybe glamour appears for you in Danny Lyon’s photographs of biker gangs from the 60s and 70s, where the face of the man is often obscured, his back turned to the camera as he weaves through traffic on his bike. Or maybe you find it in Beyonce’s cool refusal to do interviews. Glamour is mutable. It shows up all over the place.
And mystery is one factor that makes it possible.
*I’ve always found it hilarious that Sinatra insisted he was just carrying “art supplies” in that suitcase. Frank is a seminal figure in the development of celebrity and tabloid culture and I suspect I’ll get to analyzing him in this newsletter at some point.