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- Title
GLAMOUR: The Stylish Excess that Conceals a Painful Spot.
- Authors
VANOVIĆ, JELENA NIKOLIĆ
- Abstract
Emerging as a consequence of industrial production organized on the largest scale, and thus in the age of effective prohibitions, glamour appears as an offence, that is through spending, as well as through mass consumption, which is characteristic of industrial societies. The proportions of production and consumption, introduced by industrial revolution, and the consequent changes in social conditions, turned glamour into the largest spectacle ever accessible to human societies. That is the spectacle of the consumer culture, the saint of the modern age. Icons of glamour represent the gods revered by the modern man. Glamour has quickly and easily moved from cinema to various lines of industry of life styles, and crucial for its mass popularization was the importance of costume designed for the Hollywood melodramas. Costume has become one of the basic features of both aesthetics and semantics. When we take into consideration that the purpose of clothing is, in the first place, the spectacularization of identities, a question arises: what is the content which this stylistic language treats and communicates? We discover that in the very heart of this aesthetic concept rests Georges Bataille's notion of eroticism as eternal longing to establish the lost totality or continuity, an attempt to overcome the gap between the rational and the irrational in man. This is why the fundamental signifying focus of glamour is composed of problems of sexuality and death. With channelling social hysteria into a stylistic excess, glamour appears in the form of aesthetic and moral misdemeanour. Glamour allows one to, in transposing the forbidden contents into the visual, into the language of clothing, step out from mediocre, moderate, appropriate or functional, and into the unattainable, into the everlasting... In the process of spectacularization, the biological sexuality and mortality become entirely neutralized. Glamour managed to overcome the eternal problems of man by completely divorcing beauty and appeal, but also death, from the corporeal and the social givens. One has, through integrating oneself into the spectacle, at last realized the unity with the world, but the price of this success is exorbitant. One can free oneself from the loneliness and death only when turned into an image.
- Subjects
STYLE (Design); PRODUCTION (Economic theory); CONSUMPTION (Economics); INDUSTRIAL revolution; COSTUME design; GLAMOUR
- Publication
Zbornik, 2014, Vol 10, p087
- ISSN
0522-8328
- Publication type
Article