Being raised in 1950s Britain we were taught that there was something dodgy about glamour. My home-loving ma pursed her lips at the bright blond hair and assured up-slick of black eyeliner sported by a friend’s mummy who was into newbie theatricals.
She was feted for not enabling her teaching staff to wear lipstick. In the 1950s she waged terrorist warfare against the wearing of “paper-nylon” slips, built to give a sticking-out effect to the skirts and summer tops. These were often seized from sixth-formers and hung like scalps on pegs outside her study, a shameful caution to those lower down the highschool.
There had been a large amount of sex perplexity in the educational girls’ colleges of that time. What Germaine Greer called an “absurd version of manly uniform” was sometimes policed with animation : gymslip-type tunics over collared shirts and male ties, definite rules stipulating skirt lengths and the thickness of stockings. Yet we were still meant to be “ladylike”, to dress silently and smartly and always to wear hats and gloves in the street.
The stringent rules generated a sub culture of opposition.
Could you get away with a black bra, pale pink nail polish or Clearasil on teen acne? Many girls breathed a sigh of relief when they left college and could pile on mascara with complete abandonment. But just as glamour was losing the draw of the forbidden, along came second-wave feminism, alert about the hazards of turning ourselves into sex objects. Glamour has gone out of and into fashion since the late 1960s. It was back strongly in the 1980s, even tho against a background of the substantial gains women made in education and the labour market in that decade. Was this a “backlash” or something different? Naomi Wolf and, most lately, Natasha Walter have disagreed that, braced by the beauty industries, the pressures on younger girls to look great can be damaging and relentless. It is alluring to ask whether glamour, once an escape for ladies, has become a prison? But adult ladies are not simply prisoners, fools or victims, and there may be a playfulness around glamour, epitomizied by many ladies performers, as an example : Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Madonna, Courtney Love, and now, the superbly bonkers Woman Gaga. As fast as you suspect or write about glamour you enter deadly territory. It became slang in the early 20 th century, regularly connected with exotic locales, and new types of fast travel.
Men may be glamorous, as well as ladies : one thinks of pilots ( RAF crew were regularly known as “glamour boys” ), rally drivers, Rudolph Valentino, or Ivor Novello. But by the 1920s and 1930s the notion of glamour was firmly tied up with modernity, and especially with Hollywood.
think about the girls cocooned to the tips of their ears in fur, drifting through the entrance hall in the movie Grand Hotel ( 1932 ), or Marlene Dietrich, memorably described as “a Venus fur-trap”, in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus.
A substitute for wrapping yourself in fur was writhing on it. Another stock image pictured stars at their dressing tables, in silk kimonos and trapped by an array of cosmetics and scent bottles.