… the state of being envied, a kind of an alter ego, a magic mirror in which we can see our desires realised.
Not to be confused with flash and cash, luxury and class privilege, sex and Paris Hilton.
Rather, it is a potent tool of persuasion, a form of nonverbal rhetoric that heightens and focuses desire. Glamour is all about hope and change. It lifts us out of everyday experience and makes our desires seem attainable.
A word of warning though from one of the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, who learns that “desire cheats you,…, It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and glids some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it – but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone -”
The pleasure and inspiration my be real, but glamour always contains an illusion. Its allure depends on obscuring or ignoring some details while heightening others – we see the dance but the rehearsals, the stiletto heels but not the blisters, the skyline but not the dirty street, the sports car but not the gas pump, the green light but no Daisy.
