I have enjoyed Virginia Postrel’s writing for years. Her first book, The Future and Its Enemies, was a great treatment of our modern Luddites, our quasi-Luddites, our neo-Luddites, and our Luddites in denial. It was really good. In The Substance of Style, she showed an acute aesthetic sense in her survey of modern technology and it’s products. Style is not a superfluous add-on extra — it is part of the substance of what we do. Here, in The Power of Glamour, she does a wonderful job in describing an aspect of our world that is examined far too infrequently. One of the things that opponents of free markets are adept at doing is in categorizing advocates of free markets as soulless, bottom-line-cash-value only, number crunchers. I don’t know of a better refutation of that line of attack than simply pointing to the work of Virginia Postrel.
This book begins with definitions — which is hard, because an essential part of real glamour is the ineffability of the thing. Nevertheless, she does good work via negativa. Not everything that is called glamorous actually is. “Though people often equate them, glamour is not the same thing as beauty, stylishness, luxury, celebrity, or sex appeal” (p. 6). Paris Hilton is the anti-Grace Kelly. For Postrel, the essential elements of glamour are “a promise of escape and transformation; grace; and mystery” (p. 9, emphasis hers). After her very able description of what it (elusively) is, the book then goes on to show the “growth and evolution of glamour as both a spontaneous phenomenon and a calculated tool of persuasion” (p. 9).
The book is lavishly illustrated, and she points out the power of glamour in advertisements, in recruiting for the military, in shaping culture, and in describing the future. She has a number of breakout pieces that discuss the power of various icons and “for instances” — the striding woman, the horseman, the princess, or the aviator.
I have no criticism of the book as far as it goes, and it was a truly enjoyable read. But I believe it did fall short in where it could have gone, but failed to go. I don’t believe that it would be possible for a well-read Christian to read this book without thinking of C.S. Lewis’s experience with Sehnsucht in Surprised By Joy. He refers to the same kind of longing in Pilgrim’s Regress in John’s search for his elusive Island. And in his sermon The Weight of Glory, Lewis concludes with how, in the resurrection, we shall one day be identified with the beauty that tantalized us now. We shall, somehow, “get in.” In Lewis, however, he locates it as a glimpse of a longing for the eternal. If nothing in this world can satisfy this particular desire, Lewis argues that this means we were made for another world.
Postrel defines it as longing for something we cannot have here, but which does us a lot of good here because we long for it. Her second chapter is entitled “Inarticulate Longings.” In her calculus, if there isn’t anything that will fulfill this desire in this world, nevertheless this world can be made a lot better because of this desire. We may not hit the moon, but it is still good to shoot the moon. That’s actually true . . . but only because there actually is a moon.