Glamour is a beautiful illusion - the word 'glamour' originally meant a literal magic spell - that promises to transcend ordinary life and make the ideal real. It depends on a special combination of mystery and grace. Too much information breaks the spell.

Virginia Postrel

Categorized in : Promises Life Beautiful Grace

Glamour doesn’t just happen, people don’t wake up in the morning glamorous.

Virginia Postrel

wake-up morning people

Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place.

Virginia Postrel

glamour perfect world

How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis-a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism-a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition?

Virginia Postrel

competition discovery civilization

European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

Virginia Postrel

war reality people

Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who received a kidney from his wife.

Virginia Postrel

comedian wife blue

In a dynamic, decentralized system of individual choice and responsibility, people do not have to trust any authority but their own.

Virginia Postrel

individual-choice responsibility people

On the Internet, people on the tails of the bell curve can find one

Virginia Postrel

curves tails people

Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything. It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

Virginia Postrel

cutting coffee mean

Progress through trial and error depends not only on making trials, but on recognizing errors.

Virginia Postrel

trial-and-error progress errors

The mobile middle class gravitates to the cities where housing is affordable.

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middle cities class

Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want.

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doctors pressure pay

The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.

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stamps impulse hard

The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.

Virginia Postrel

smart skills thinking

The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace.

Virginia Postrel

luxury imagination air

Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.

Virginia Postrel

mba communication real

Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn’t give us a completely clear picture.

Virginia Postrel

opaque giving world

At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.

Virginia Postrel

intelligence inspirational people

The elements that create glamour are not specific styles - bias-cut gowns or lacquered furniture - but more general qualities: grace, mystery, transcendence. To the right audience, Halle Berry is more glamorous commanding the elements as Storm in the X-Men movies than she is walking the red carpet in a designer gown.

Virginia Postrel

storm red grace walking

Like the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popular hopes for a new era of technological achievement and commercial abundance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, neon-lit streets pulsed with visual excitement from Vancouver to Miami.

Virginia Postrel

new like excitement achievement

Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion.

Virginia Postrel

childhood appreciation war world