The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion
Celebrating Founders' Day with Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and Virginia Postrel
Shortly after we married in 2011, sitting in the bedroom of our small Silicon Valley home, my wife and I read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaascson. We read it together—out loud—one chapter a night. This was a few months after Jobs had passed away. For various reasons—that I don’t completely understand—Steve is an important person in our lives. Reading that biography with my wife was memorable and joyful.
Today is Presidents’ Day—which I prefer to think of as Founders’ Day, as it is celebrated at my children’s school. In addition to remembering the Founding Fathers—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc.—I like to remember greats of American entrepreneurialism, such as Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. Many have written about Jobs and Disney, but do we understand what made them great?
This morning I picked up Virginia Postrel’s The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion—read a few pages, and decided I wanted to read this book with my wife—together, out load—just like we had read Steve’s biography years ago. The covers of these two books—Steve Jobs and The Power of Glamour—are similarly beautiful—black and white. Disney’s portrait above shares a similar allure. What do these images have in common? Could it be glamour?
What exactly is glamour? And why am I not familiar with it?
Let’s take a peek at chapter 1. Here is Postrel writing about Charles Lindbergh.
The twentieth century's most glamorous aviator, however, was a civilian: Charles Lindbergh, whose allure after his 1927 solo flight from New York to Paris was as potent as any movie star's. "You are that dream-self we all long to be," declared a fan.
What audiences saw in the young flier depended on their own ideals. To his American public, the clean-cut young man with a pioneering spirit embodied the best of their country's heritage. His discipline and midwestern modesty combined youth with the values of an earlier time, redeeming the disillusioned and decadent Jazz Age. "You symbolize our splendid, secret dreams / Ideals of manhood, virtues we hold dear," another devotee versified.
Interesting. What is this glamour thing? And what value does it have to my family?
Here’s Postrel giving an overview of her book.
In this chapter, we begin to understand what kind of phenomenon glamour is: like humor, a form of communication that elicits a distinctive emotional response. In the next chapter, we'll identify and investigate that response—a sense of projection and longing and explore why so many different objects can produce it: what glamour does. We will discover that, like the gilded world seen through a candy wrapper, glamour is an illusion "known to be false but felt to be true," which focuses and intensifies a preexisting but previously inchoate yearning. The following three chapters then extract and examine the essential elements—a promise of escape and transformation; grace; and mystery—that appear in all versions of glamour and distinguish it from other forms of nonverbal rhetoric, thus explaining how glamour works.
As we develop this theory, we'll also learn how to detect glamour's less-obvious manifestations and, potentially, how to construct or dispel it. The theory allows us to understand why such diverse and sometimes contradictory things can seem glamorous: how Jackie Kennedy is like the Chrysler Building or a sports car like a Moleskine notebook, or why some audiences might find glamour in nuns, wind turbines, or Star Trek. We'll also resolve certain smaller puzzles. Why, for instance, is glamour so easily lost? How can it be associated so strongly with both elegance and sex appeal? What is its connection to androgyny? Why are certain aesthetic tropes, such as glittering light, silhouettes, or black-and-white imagery, so often associated with it?
Having built a specific definition for glamour, we can then examine its history without fear of going astray. Beginning with chapter six, we'll trace the growth and evolution of glamour as both a spontaneous phenomenon and a calculated tool of persuasion. We'll first examine how, and under what conditions, glamour manifested itself in premodern times and how it changed and proliferated with the growth of large, commercial cities. Then, in chapter seven, we'll look at the forms and influence of glamour in the twentieth century, focusing on its importance in exploring and defining modernity. Finally, we'll consider how glamour has evolved in today's media-savvy and fragmented culture.
I have a feeling Postrel has a lot to teach us about glamour. Feel free to read along and add your comments as we go.