Meeting Your Fantasy Self
The phenomenon of glamour, explained. Plus: an introduction to this newsletter.
I’ve always longed to be someone else. Haven’t you?
This feeling probably came from a time before I could talk. My first conscious memory of this feeling, though, comes from when I was about five or six. I was in the salon with my mother and sister, waiting for my turn on the stylist’s chair. My mom was getting a perm and my sister was getting her hair cut. I was sitting on the couch by the Paul Mitchell display. Among the eighties era advertisements for Vidal Sassoon and Revlon, I saw a picture on the opposite wall of Marilyn Monroe. I can still see it now. Her shoulders are draped in white fur, and she appears luminous and shrouded in shadow. It went beyond merely her beauty. She seemed so poised, and so mysterious. In the hair salon, I saw that beauty took a long time and labor to create. But the lady in the picture seemed to transcend all that somehow. She looked like someone who could never be lonely–because she already had everything she needed.
I felt a pang in my chest. I think I cried, sitting there alone on the black couch, surrounded by the smell of Aqua Net and hair bleach. And yet, I wasn’t sad. I remember even feeling glad that the pain was there.
What I experienced then in my little six year old heart was a longing for transformation, though I couldn’t verbalize it yet. All I felt was yearning, an all-consuming yearning to be like the lady in the photograph.
I was seeing a representation of my Fantasy Self. There’s a name for that experience. It’s called glamour.
It doesn’t matter that Marilyn’s actual beauty routine took at least three hours. It doesn’t matter that the self-possession and aloofness she projected in the image only came to her in short bursts. It doesn’t matter that the qualities I projected onto her may not have been true.
Glamour has nothing to do with objective truth. In the strictest terms, it isn’t real. It’s an illusion.
When I say the word glamour, you probably think of red carpets and Marcel waves and diamonds and Bugattis–and most likely Marilyn, too. But glamour isn’t a look or a design style. Glamour is much more mutable, personal, and complex. It requires extremely specific conditions, and is as ephemeral as it is distinct. It isn’t beauty, it isn’t wealth, it isn’t luxury, and it doesn’t depend on any of these things in order to exist.
So, to sum up: glamour isn’t real, it isn’t a design style, and it isn’t confined to traditional signals of power or cultural currency as is commonly believed. But this mysterious, unpredictable phenomenon remains as potent a driver of behavior as any of the other tactics that marketers and salespeople use to manipulate our brains. In certain ways, I believe it surpasses those tactics. It’s as irresistible as loss aversion, as intense as infatuation, as memorable as a first kiss. Nothing nourishes the imagination quite like glamour does. A flash of hypnotic fire. Swiftly gone, but not so swiftly forgotten. To wit: I recently dyed my hair platinum blonde. Guess whose picture I took to the salon, twenty-four years after I beheld her for the first time?
Glamour helps us manifest in the topside world what’s been fomenting underneath–it gives us a symbol for certain subconscious desires we aren’t even aware of. In so doing, it helps us change. It’s the hidden motivator behind much of our purchasing behavior. But glamour isn’t only about buying things. It compels us to adopt new habits, learn new skills, and take new risks. When understood well, it’s as powerful a tool of self actualization as anything you’ll learn on the therapist’s couch.
Ever since that fateful meeting with Marilyn, glamour has become one of my primary preoccupations. My core interests–film, fashion, advertising, cosmetics, advanced aesthetics, music, celebrity–all trade in it (or attempt to) as a matter of course. But to confine glamour to only those industries would underestimate its versatility and volatility.
The word glamour comes from old Scots, and it originally meant “shapeshifting spell”. As such, we can think of glamour as one of the old shape shifting gods. You never know what tree it’s going to pop out from to dazzle you and fill you with visions of who you could be. For me, it wears Manolo Blahniks. For you, it could wear Hunter wellies. I see it all over the films of the mid century. But you could find it in a $20 Erewhon smoothie, the red carpet style of Kristen Stewart, a Le Creuset Dutch oven. van life YouTube videos, Pumping Iron, Robert Oppenheimer, a new Canon camera, or Ballerina Farm.
By the same token, there are places you’ll never find it, ground where it dares not tread.
Glamour is tricky, as any of the old, now-marginalized gods would be. It’s shadowy, too, in the Jungian sense–it often crystallizes desires we may consider taboo, impractical, or outlandish.
I’ve set myself a difficult task in endeavoring to understand glamour. That’s why this newsletter will do three things.
First, it will attempt to define what glamour is and what it is not. I know this will be controversial. But if you’re willing to go there with me together, I think we’ll both learn something.
Second, it will chronicle and catalog what is glamorous to me–it is, after all, my party. I hope this exercise will help you excavate what’s glamorous to you.
Third, it will track glamour where it occurs in the culture, like a bloodhound on the scent. I may take the occasional excursion into related topics like eroticism (which I believe has striking similarities to glamour, and is just as oversimplified), Old Hollywood history (the genesis of many stereotypes of glamour), and the nature of contemporary celebrity. We will also, from time to time, engage with the works of certain philosophers, including Virginia Postrel, who wrote the definitive book on the subject of glamour, and to whom I’m eternally indebted for taking this phenomenon seriously.
In other words, the content of this newsletter may be as unpredictable and surprising as the phenomenon of glamour itself, but that’s kind of the idea.
Along the way, I’ll edge ever closer to my Fantasy Self.
And so, I wager, will you.