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Stephen Gundle
was originally Scottish. It was an alteration of the word grammar that retained the
sense of the old word gramarye (“occult learning, magic, necromancy”). The
Oxford English Dictionary (1989) also highlights the word’s Scottish origins and
derivation from grammar, although this is indicated to mean magic, enchantment,
and spells rather than necromancy and the occult. According to Fowler’s, glamour
passed into standard English usage around the 1830s with the meaning of “a
delusive or alluring charm.” For Websters Third New International Dictionary
(1961), glamour is “an elusive, mysteriously exciting and often illusory attractiveness
that stirs the imagination and appeals to a taste for the unconventional, the
unexpected, the colorful, or the exotic.” In its secondary meanings glamour is said
to be “a strangely alluring atmosphere of romantic enchantment; bewitching,
intangible, irresistibly magnetic charm; . . . personal charm and poise combined
with unusual physical and sexual attractiveness.”
Some observers have suggested that glamour is a timeless quality. Camille
Paglia, for example, has asserted that Nefertiti was the first public figure to turn
herself into “a manufactured being” possessed of “radiant glamour” and that
glamour’s origins are to be found in ancient Egypt. 1 Undoubtedly, modern glamour
has a complex and long prehistory that it is beyond the scope of this chapter to
consider even briefly. 2 Here the concern is with the meanings and associations the
term acquired in the 1930s, when it first entered everyday currency. From that
time, the world of illusion, mystery, seduction and enchantment has been found
largely in media representations. Glamour is also associated with commercial
strategies of persuasion. Through consumer products, people are promised instant
transformation and entry into a realm of desire. This effect is achieved by adding
colorful, desirable, and satisfying ideas and images to mundane products thus
enabling them to speak not merely to needs but to longings and dreams.
Glamour as it is understood today, as a structure of enchantment deployed by
cultural industries, was first developed by Hollywood. In the 1930s, the major
studios, having consolidated their domination of the industry, developed a star
system in which dozens of young men and women were groomed and molded into
glittering ideal-types whose fortune, beauty, spending power, and exciting lives
dazzled the film-going public. Writing in 1939 about American film stars,
Margaret Thorp defined glamour as “sex appeal plus luxury plus elegance plus
romance.”
The place to study glamour today is the fan magazines [she noted]. Fan magazines are
distilled as stimulants of the most exhilarating kind. Everything is superlative, surprising,
exciting . . . Nothing ever stands still, nothing ever rests, least of all the sentences . . .
Clothes of course are endlessly pictured and described usually with marble fountains,
private swimming pools or limousines in the background . . . Every aspect of life, trivial
and important, should be bathed in the purple glow of publicity. 3
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