Abstract
In The Stars, the French sociologist Edgar Morin argued that, for the audience, Hollywood film stars were god-like figures, the worship of whom implied a process of spiritualisation. At the same time, however, the stars were manufactured commodities. ‘The star is a total item of merchandise,’ he wrote. ‘There is not an inch of her body, not a shred of her soul, not a memory of her life that cannot be thrown on the market’ (Morin 1960: 137). Of all the stars produced by Hollywood cinema, Marilyn Monroe was the most marketable. Originally a classically curvaceous pin-up, she was fashioned by the alchemists of 20th Century Fox into a stereotypical blonde, the dream of all returning soldiers, something that ‘Michelangelo might have carved out of candy’ (McCann 1988: 20). Although she was neither the first sex symbol nor the first dumb blonde, she became important because she was turned into an image of desirable female sexuality at the precise moment when this sort of appeal could be combined for the first time with wholesomeness and innocence. In films such as All About Eve, Niagara, How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch, all made between 1950 and 1955, her sex appeal was normalised, even if it continued to be considered ‘something to be possessed, like a mistress bought with diamonds’ (Dyer 1988: 75).
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Notes
This applies also to J. Rosa (ed.). Glamour: Fashion + Industrial Design + Architecture (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 2004). The essays in this catalogue survey glamour, mostly in the post-1945 period, but no theory is offered.
This definition of glamour was first set out in R. C. V. Buckley and S. Gundle, ‘Fashion and Glamour’, in Nicola White and Ian Griffiths (eds.), The Fashion Business: Theory, Practice, Image (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 42.
On the democratisation of desire, see W. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993).
L. Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 19.
L. Irigaray, Speaking of the Other Woman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
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© 2006 Stephen Gundle and Clino T. Castelli
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Gundle, S., Castelli, C.T. (2006). Introduction. In: The Glamour System. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510456_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510456_1
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