My book The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion will be out November 5 and is available for pre-order on Amazon. Here's the catalog description: Critically acclaimed author and Bloomberg View columnist Virginia Postrel offers a provocative theory of glamour, elucidating how this dominant cultural force shapes our most fundamental choices, channels our deepest yearnings, and reveals who we really are. Skimming the glossy pages of a magazine or glimpsing a flashy billboard, it’s easy to reduce glamour to mere celebrity or glitz. Yet glamour is a potent cultural force whose magic reaches far beyond the spheres of fashion or film, influencing where we choose to live, which careers we pursue, where we invest, and how we vote. Even in its most seemingly frivolous forms, despite its transient and illusory nature, glamour articulates our secret longings and exposes our true characters. Analyzing icons from Achilles to... Continue reading

Contrary to popular belief, the glamour of air travel didn't disappear with the crowded planes brought on by deregulation and cheaper prices. It started dissipating in the late 1960s, with the coming of jumbo jets and terrorist hijackings. “In the popular imagination,” writes architectural historian Alastair Gordon in his excellent book Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure , “air travel was now equated with boredom and disaster.” This Weather.com slide show on “Glamour in the Skies” reminded me of another change--this one a technological improvement--that eroded airline glamour around the same time: the disappearance of the staircase in favor of safer, more weatherproof indoor jet bridges. If you're a traveler, you'd much rather walk directly into the terminal on a more-or-less level jet bridge. But the old stairs set the traveler apart from the crowds on the ground. They created a dramatic sense of arrival... Continue reading

Renaissance of Roland Barthes, an interdisciplinary conference on the late critical theorist's influence on various subjects, will be held at the CUNY Graduate Center on April 25-26, 2013 at 365 5th Avenue (btw 34th and 35th Streets), NY, NY 10065. I will be presenting on Barthes' contributions to fashion and dress theory on Thursday, April 25 in a panel from 2:15pm-3:45pm (room 8402), moderated by CUNY's chair of fashion studies, Eugenia Paulicelli. Full conference program and directions: http://barthesconference2013.wordpress.com/ In Fashion This Year: Roland Barthes and Dress Theory The study of dress is a subject that, more so than almost every other cultural discipline, has historically been met with derision in its efforts to become a widely respected field of academic study. Its long road to acceptance among research universities and similar field authorities was aided in part by its examination and interpretation by academics from other disciplines, especially during the... Continue reading

Cameron Silver in Decades Cameron Silver, the owner of the L.A. luxury vintage shop Decades, is known for dressing Hollywood stars for the red carpet, using a remarkable eye for seeing contemporary style in vintage clothing. With his book Decades: A Century of Fashion , he demonstrates the sophisticated knowledge of fashion history that undergirds his success as a retailer and stylist. A survey of 20th-century women’s fashion, the book is beautiful, but it’s also smart, recalling styles often written out of fashion chronicles. Its history of the 1970s, for instance, includes not just the sexy “satin-skinned beauties” of Studio 54 but also the “prairie-chic sensibility” of Laura Ashley's maxi dresses. Contrasting muses—Cheryl Tiegs versus Bianca Jagger, for example, or Joan Crawford's tough-minded “Consumer” versus Rita Hayworth's eye-candy “Consumed”—add further nuance, reminding readers that decades do not come with simple, one-note themes. (Google Books offers some limited previews of the... Continue reading

Shutterstock, the huge stock-photo house, has put together an infographic displaying the trends in what its users are downloading. Its data confirm what our Vintage Week suggested: the idea of “vintage” is hot. “If you combined all the searches for ‘Cats,’ ‘Dogs,’ ‘Retro,’ and ‘Hipster,’ you still wouldn’t beat the number of searches for ‘Vintage,’” says Shutterstock. Vintage Week is stretching into this week as well. Stay tuned for more posts. Related articles Vintage Week: DG Q&A with Vixen Vintage Blogger Solanah Cornell Vintage Week: DG Q&A with Liza D. of Better Dresses Vintage Continue reading

Among vintage enthusiasts, Vixen Vintage blogger Solanah Cornell is a first-name-only celebrity and a go-to source for advice on such lost arts as how to set your hair in pin curls and how to buy vintage lingerie. As a model for online vintage shops and a vintage-fashion blogger she's also famous for her ability to strike a vintage pose. DG: How do you define vintage? Solanah: Everyone will give you a different answer, but I define it as anything made approximately 20-80 years from now. Antique is anything older than 80 years old, and newer than 20 is second hand. DG: Who does wearing vintage appeal to? Solanah: A variety of different people, whether they are interested in alternative fashion or want to outwardly express their interest in nostalgia. DG: What do you think of mixing vintage and contemporary pieces? Do you ever wear contemporary outfits? Solanah: I love it,... Continue reading

Born in 1965, Liza D., the proprietor of the two-year-old online shop Better Dresses Vintage, grew up in the New York suburbs as the daughter of an advertising copywriter (“a real-life ‘Mad Man,’” she says). “Growing up,” she says, “the emphasis was on education, the arts, and manners. My mom was a very strong influence. She taught me about taste, and all aspects of etiquette.” An accomplished seamstress, her mother also taught Liza how to recognize and appreciate quality garments—knowledge that she now turns to hunting for vintage treasures. (Here she wears a 1950s sundress at home.) DG: How did you get into the vintage business? Liza: My lifelong appreciation of all things lovely, old-fashioned, and well-made led me to buy and wear vintage clothing. Not exclusively or every day, but enough to seek it out as both superior to, and more affordable than, most modern options. After having my... Continue reading

In a 1912 New York Times article bylined Margaine Lacroix, the designer who only four years earlier had shocked Paris with her sexy dresses opined on the question, "Do Women Like Eccentric Clothes?" She argued that they do not. "Now, as ever, the woman of society does not wear bizarre clothes," she wrote. You will say, are not the great Parisian houses, or at any rate a number of them, turning out numbers of extraordinary eccentricity? You are quite right. They are. And to that I can only reply that those models are created but not worn... [T]he eccentric models one sees belong to the same order of things as those strange and beautiful birds one hears about in tropical countries. Glittering and beautiful with all the colors of the rainbow they die in a day or, in other words, they are exported. Then, stripped of their peculiarly bewildering eccentrities,... Continue reading

In honor of International Women's Day, on Friday Racked posted a tribute to "Six Groundbreaking Women Designers Who Changed Fashion," rounding up the usual suspects from Coco Chanel to Miuccia Prada. Left off the Racked list, because she's largely been forgotten, was the pioneering pre-World War I designer Jeanne Margaine-Lacroix, known in her day simply as Margaine-Lacroix. Susie Ralph, a British fashion historian, is engaged in a one-woman crusade to restore this once-prominent designer to her rightful place in history. Here, introducing an exhibit on Margaine-Lacroix, she explains how the designer's skintight, corsetless designs shocked Paris in 1908: In 1908 Jeanne Margaine-Lacroix sent three mannequins to the Longchamp race-course clad in her form-revealing robes-tanagréennes. These corsetless dresses caused a sensation among Paris’ fashionable crowd - a riot according to some newspaper reports. Worn without corsets and slit to the knee on one side over the most transparent of underskirts, their... Continue reading

'Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen' on view at the NYPL for the Performing Arts, Oct. 18, 2012 - Jan. 12, 2013. With this post, we introduce our newest DG contributor, Jessica Barber. (If the post's formatting looks odd, please adjust the width of your browser window. TypePad can produce some odd effects with photo placement, and they aren't Jessica's fault.)--vp Last month I had the great pleasure of patronizing the beautifully curated costume exhibition Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen, in a seemingly unlikely venue for such a topic: the New York Public Library. The exhibition was organized by the Kent State University Museum, which was given 700 items from Hepburn's estate several years after her passing in 2003 at the age of 96. (The museum is renowned for its extensive costume collection, which contains more than 40,000 objects.) In collaboration with the NYPL, the exhibition included... Continue reading

New York Times style writer Christine Haughney profiles my friend Joan Kron, who covers plastic surgery for Allure, in this feature and interviews her in the first segment of the video above. (See Joan's DG Q&A here.) "Plastic surgery," says Joan in the video, "is the last subject in style that hasn't really gotten new journalism." "This is something that women don't share. So very early on I decided I would tell the truth. I would tell the truth about my age. I would tell the truth about surgery—that I had it. And people are so shocked. Then it made me very popular. I can be sitting there quietly at a dinner party and somebody says, 'Joan covers plastic surgery.' And then--bam!—I'm surrounded." An excerpt from the profile: “I never lie about my age. I tell everybody about my age because I don’t think women have enough role models,” Ms.... Continue reading

While doing research in back issues of Vogue, I found this familiar-looking ad from 1974, three years before the debut of Star Wars. Of course, unlike Star Wars, which supposedly took place "long, long ago," Quathra is "a luxury fabric from the [oh so glamorous] 21st century." In the actual 21st century, Qathra (no u) is a coffee house in Brooklyn--an institution, not to mention a locale, not envisioned by 20th-century futurists. (The textile company appears to have canceled its trademark in 1982.) Related articles Glamour and the Future: Why Do We Miss Flying Cars but Not Robot Maids? The Vogue Archives: 1950′s Does This Fabric Ad From A 1974 Issue Of Vogue Look Familiar To You? Continue reading

Burlesque star Dita von Teese (née Heather Sweet) has said that she didn’t wait around to become beautiful – she remade herself to become beautiful. She transforms her facial features with pale foundation that covers never-to-be-seen freckles, red lipstick, winged eyeliner, and a tattooed beauty mark. She wears corsets that artificially constrict her waist. And, as a natural blonde, she dyes her hair an inky black and sculpts it to Veronica Lake perfection. She explicitly embraces artifice, which I deem a welcome alternative to the prevailing notion of natural-as-beautiful. As we discuss makeovers here on Deepglamour.net, I think one type of makeover deserving of attention is temporary, extreme transformation. Often the goal of a makeover is to become a prettier version of oneself, but sometimes the goal is akin to achieving an altogether different persona. For performers like Dita, the transformation is clearly for professional reasons as much as personal.... Continue reading

When I turned in the manuscript of my book (now titled The Power of Glamour, with publication set for next November), I thought I’d get a makeover, for two reasons. The first was practical. I’d been on a sort of hair-dressing strike and hadn’t had a haircut in nine months or seen a colorist in nearly two years. The second was intellectual. The makeover is modern glamour—or glamorous modernity—distilled to its essence: transformation made possible by expertise. Glamour isn’t a style. It’s something you feel. You’re flipping through a magazine and suddenly feel transported: that dress, that room, that vacation spot, those shoes—something speaks to you, pulls you into the scene, and makes you feel that if only you inhabited that alternative reality, life would be perfect. That’s glamour at work. It makes the ideal seem attainable. To an audience gazing at before and after pictures or the “reveal” scene... Continue reading

These days, hairdressers tend to concentrate either on cutting and styling or on color--and they certainly don't do makeup. But Diane Gardner knew at an early age that she wanted to do it all. "I thought that in order to transform someone you had to do all three services," she says. "Because you have a vision, and then someone else takes it away from you when they do one of the other services." At 19, she moved from New Jersey to Manhattan to hone her skills. She started with color, training at Louis Licari's La Coupe salon on Madison Avenue. With Licari's grudging permission, she then "moved downstairs" to apprentice with Antonio da Costa Rocha, who, she says, not only taught her how to cut but "how to style in a very glamorous way." The trick, then, was to learn makeup. Fortunately, Trish McEvoy, then an aesthetician, was a La... Continue reading

When Mademoiselle ran the first before-and-after beauty feature in 1936, the magazine enlisted Paramount Studios makeup artist Eddie Senz to transform Barbara Phillips, a nurse who described herself as “homely as a hedgehog,” into something resembling a Hollywood star. He was not tactful. “Your face is too narrow and—er—well your neck’s too long,” he told Phillips. He was even blunter with the anonymous subjects he transformed for the regular column Mademoiselle started after the makeover was a huge hit. “Once a young woman built on these lines would have been described as pleasingly plump,” he wrote in one column. “But let’s be realistic and point out that she’s short, fat, stocky, and missing in attractive feminine curves.” For all his lack of tact, Senz did know how to change people’s looks. While at Paramount, he so dramatically transformed Frances Farmer that, her biographer Peter Shelley writes, “she did not recognize... Continue reading

It looks like suburbia, but it still represents escape. In my new Bloomberg View column, I criticize the trendy denigration of technological progress that doesn't solve "big problems" like going to Mars. Here's an excerpt: In speeches, interviews and articles, [Peter] Thiel decries what he sees as the country's lack of significant innovations. "When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains," he wrote last year in National Review. "Consider the most literal instance of non­acceleration: We are no longer moving faster." Such warnings serve a useful purpose. Political barriers have in fact made it harder to innovate with atoms than with bits. New technologies as diverse as hydraulic fracturing and direct-to-consumer genetic testing (neither mentioned by Thiel) attract instant and predictable opposition. As Thiel writes, "Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare." But the current funk... Continue reading

Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills just conducted a two-day auction of property from Greta Garbo's estate. Although a superstar in the 1930s, Garbo made her last movie, the flop Two-Faced Woman, in 1941 and died in 1990. Before Friday, it wasn't clear that she maintained enough of a fan base to make her property especially valuable solely on the basis of provenance. Julien's pre-auction valuations were, in fact, modest enough that when my friend Kate Hahn (whose Forgotten Fashion: An Illustrated Faux History Of Outrageous Trends And Their Untimely Demise , excerpted here and here, is a DG favorite) and I visited the preview we actually bid on a few items. An early sign that we needn't have bothered was this set of Garbo's driving caps, which had a pre-auction estimate of $150 to $200. They sold for 100 times that: $15,000. Greta Garbo's driving caps had an estimated value... Continue reading

As part of my book research, I've been going through every issue of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar from selected years between 1929 and 1974. Although I'm looking for specific imagery, I've found a lot of interesting other items in the process, including this 1939 Vogue photo of Evalyn Walsh McLean packing kits to send French soldiers. ("Each kit is packed with comforts: sweater, shirt, gloves, handkerchief, socks, pipe, tobacco, cigarettes, soap, towel, and chocolates.") To see a larger version, click on the photo. Continue reading

To get you in the mood for Makeover Week, beginning Monday, we're happy to offer a giveaway from Global Beauty Care. The winner will receive a gift pack of all three versions of their IntésivEye eye-makeup remover pads: Cucumber Soothing, Oil-Free, and Anti-Wrinkle versions. Each pack includes 30 pads. Infused with extracts and oils, these thick pads gently remove stubborn eye make-up, eye-liner, eye-shadow and waterproof mascara. They moisturize the skin as they clean and are hypoallergenic and PH-balanced. Begin the new year with a clean new face. To enter, leave a comment below before midnight Pacific Time on December 31, 2012. The winner will be chosen using Random.org, and the prize will be mailed directly from Lane Communications. Open to U.S. residents only. We reserve the right to delete comments deemed to be spam. Continue reading

The Lexicon of Love album cover Some 30 years ago, the New Romantic music movement reignited a return to sophisticated glamour and elegance in pop music sound and style. Next Tuesday, December 18, one of the quintessential New Romantic bands, ABC, will celebrate that moment in time with a special performance at London's Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Fronted by the blonde, statuesque singer Martin Fry, the band will perform its 1982 debut album, The Lexicon Of Love , backed by a full symphony orchestra. “Thirty years is insane but the album still purrs along like a Bentley,” Fry recently told the Daily Star, drawing a comparison to another sort of glamour icon. The album is lush and romantic, even without an orchestra. Readers might recall hits off the Trevor Horn-produced album, such as "Look of Love" and "Poison Arrow." But one need not even care for the music to appreciate... Continue reading