Key Elements of Glamour, Part Two: Grace
You're painting a masterpiece. Make sure to hide the brushstrokes.
My fingertips were the color of dying violets.
It was cold and damp and dark in the park in December, and yet just warm enough for mosquitoes to find me and give me their poison kisses. Wherever they found bare skin. Wherever they could get through my clothes—which wasn’t hard, considering what I had on. Later I would count the bites on my body with help from the boy I loved, and there were eighty-three of them. In the park, my eyes burned from crying. I’d barely eaten in days. I was consumed with fear and sorrow.
But that’s not how I look in the photo.
In the photo, I come across reasonably poised and serene. I’ve curled my hand so you can’t see how cold my fingers are. I am standing still just long enough in between ineffective, hysterical swats at the mosquitoes for Johnny to get a good shot. My gaze has shifted from forlorn to aloof and slightly haughty, since there’s a camera in front of me and I am “on”. In the photo, I’m not the shell-shocked, infinitely fragile young girl having rampant panic attacks because she knows the boy she loves will leave her. In the photo I’m a forest fairy. I am beautiful, and I belong there.
Glamour is an illusion that rests on another illusion: grace. As Virginia Postrel writes, one of the components of glamour is “the art that conceals art,” also known as sprezzatura. It’s the act of hiding the brushstrokes. And I don’t consider myself a glamorous person generally, but I can be pretty good at this.
The first time I ever modeled in front of the camera, I was fifteen. My friend Mandy’s dad took my headshots. He told me that modeling is about appearing comfortable while actually holding your body in a way that’s not comfortable. If you really rest your face in a cupped hand, the flesh of your cheek will bunch up around your eye, so you have to just pretend that you’re doing resting your chin on your hand. Same thing with sitting in a chair. You need to stay perched on the edge of the seat. You always have to be aware of how you’re holding your hands, because our hands show emotion just as much as our eyes do. Maybe more. Many of the things we’d rather people didn’t know about us are revealed by how we hold a beer, light a cigarette, open a letter.
Anyway, I took that training to heart. I’m not that good of a model because I have insufficient cheekbones, but I can take a decent picture. It takes training. Grace is almost always the result of practice. Cary Grant wasn’t born that way. Ava Gardner was, but she was just built different and everyone who knew her said so. For most of us, the appearance of effortlessness is a sleight of hand that’s pretty taxing.
But why is this effort-that-conceals effort necessary for glamour? Because glamour is about our fantasies and aspirations. And nobody fantasizes about effort. Not really. Be honest with yourself. Even if you are an athlete, sure, you fantasize about something that involves a great deal of effort to achieve, I’m not denying that. But the projection of your Fantasy Self is more likely to be found in those exemplars of your sport that make it look easy. You want to swing the bat or drop into a wave with gorgeous, flowing ease. And I’ll bet that when you were little, you saw a picture of Kelly Slater and all you dreamed of was the moment when you could surf Pipeline like it was nothing.
The kind of grace I know I’m able to project in photos at least occasionally is what Virginia Postrel terms “darkroom grace.” It’s the art of concealing the undesirable or mundane through the composition and editing of a still image. When Postrel wrote The Power of Glamour in 2013, Instagram was not even three years old. That platform became all about chasing darkroom grace, but people frequently went too far in attempting to create it. And they still do.
As we all know, the Instagram aesthetic became about perfection, and that’s not the same thing as the appearance of effortlessness. This is why, try as they might, the Kardashian-Jenners are generally not glamorous people. Their aesthetic is one of hyperperfection. In fact, the effort required to maintain and create their beauty is completely obvious. I’m not just talking the about good or bad Photoshop, or the many surgical and injectable enhancements that the women in this family enjoy. (No tea no shade to them; I’ve had filler, too). I’m also talking about how many hundreds of times we’ve seen Kim tapping away on her phone in the makeup chair getting her eyelashes glued on. That’s practically the beginning of every episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians or whatever the new show is called on Hulu. The look takes a glam squad, and you can tell.
I’m not saying the result isn’t beautiful. I’m simply saying that it isn’t glamorous, because the effort behind it is too conspicuous. While all the members of that family hide just how much they’ve done to alter their bodies, the other barriers to looking like they do—the hair and makeup teams, the gym sessions, the personal chefs, the fabulous wealth required to pay for it all—are on full display. I’d go so far as to say the effort is the point of the Jenndashian aesthetic. If they’re selling a dream (and they are!) it’s the dream of being able to divert vast sums of time, thought, and money into the pursuit of beauty that can only be attained through extreme contrivance. And that’s fundamentally at odds with the nature of glamour as a phenomenon.
Glamour requires artifice, but it can’t be too obvious. If it’s too obvious, we can’t seamlessly lose ourselves in projection and yearning. Ironically, too much smoothing over in the darkroom creates friction when it comes to producing fantasy, desire, and escape. The image has to feel close enough to reality to seem attainable. (All you people who herald AI as the greatest thing since Jesus Christ, do take note.) This tension is one of the things that makes glamour fragile and ephemeral.
The second kind of glamorous grace is “theatrical grace,” which exists—even if only for a moment—in space and time. It isn’t bound by the strictures of the still image, and doesn’t have the same compositional or editorial shortcuts available. It’s the less controversial of the two, which is why it’s less interesting to me. (I am, after all, an Aries.) But it’s worth addressing, and we can find it not only in real life moments but also in movies and video. When people talk about Old Hollywood glamour, this is often what they mean. How Audrey Hepburn seems to glide through Funny Face or Roman Holiday with so much presence and poise it’s as if she floats. Or how Cary Grant always appears so perfectly well-appointed and at ease in his body but wears it all so lightly. There’s an endlessly appealing freedom about his movements, like he’s not bound by the little subconscious tics we all do when we’re nervous or edgy. One of my favorite examples of theatrical grace, maybe ever, is Gene Kelly’s famous performance of the title song in Singin in the Rain.
There are many myths about the making of this sequence. It wasn’t shot in a single take—it took at least two days to film. (It does feel like that when you first watch it, because there are very few cuts.) And they didn’t mix milk with the rainwater to make it show up better on camera. The smell on set would have been quite heinous if they had. But Kelly did have a fever of 103 while shooting, and I’m sure if he didn’t already have an ear infection beforehand, he would’ve after dancing under the rain machines for hours and hours. Still he was able to create one of the most transcendently joyful scenes in the history of Hollywood cinema. It took tremendous effort, he pushed through real sickness and discomfort, and you can’t tell at all.
But here’s where glamour gets tricky. (Which I promised it would.) Because while the dancers of the world may project their fantasies of mastery onto this scene, there is something else going on for the rest of us. Gene Kelly’s character is dancing around with reckless abandon because he is falling in love.
That scene is so moving to me (and I suspect to many others) because it allows me to project onto him my desire for that kind of all-encompassing, ecstatic, euphoric love. I don’t want to dance that way. I want to feel that way.
It might be “cringe” for me to admit that, but it’s true. And it’s a standard no actual love affair could ever meet, because love is about those feelings, at least at first…but it’s also about being kind to the person who interrupts you even after you tell them it upsets you, who thinks that Maneskin is a good band, who eats all of your favorite Sees Kona Coffee Truffles without asking. (You know who you are! I will never forgive you!) It’s about compromise and at-times harrowing emotional risks. But watching Gene Kelly tap dance in the rain also surfaces to my conscious mind the authentic, heartfelt desire I have for a great love.
And for a moment, I can dance alongside him in a dream of that desire fulfilled.
*the subtitle is a line from Betty Draper in the first season of Mad Men, who I fully intend to write an entire essay about at some point.