April 14, 2007

posted by Frank Pasquale

The Devil does wear Prada!

I can't comment on the legal implications, but Postrel outdoes Bernard Mandeville here, and that's no mean accomplishment: private vices (envy, avarice, etc.) not only bring 'publick benefits' but, through glamour, 'an essential imaginative leap toward personal achievement.' Wow!!! Just what we need for what ails us, an apologia for opulence and desire, an apologia for 'keeping up with the Kennedys.' I once was blind but now I see: Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous are our salvation. All this time I've been enjoying the articles in the The New Yorker, when I should have focused on the ads with full-page pictures of the glamorous people: their youth and beauty, their clothing, jewelry and cars, their restaurants and interior decorating, their parties and vacations. Now I know why my doctor and dentist have Architectural Digest, Art & Antiques, Vogue, ELLE, Vanity Fair, Santa Barbara...in the waiting room! They truly have my personal well-being and overall human flourishing in mind! Makes me want to holler, 'Give me that old time religion:' Let's rehabilitate Victorian moral critics like John Ruskin or William Morris. Or Christian Socialists like R.H. Tawney.

I'm reminded of Nicholas Xenos' comment in Scarcity and Modernity (1989): '[Adam] Smith emphasized the second-order happiness the competition for social esteem brings and the material wealth it inadvertently generates, but as that competition intensifies, as the perspective of comparison narrows, it sows the seeds of perpetual frustration. Chasing an image of what we would like to be like, we are less likely to be satisfied with what we are at any moment. We resent those whom we cannot catch and those whom we perceive as trying to catch us. Consuming is the activity of a democracy of signs; resentment is its final judgment. [...] In such a social situation, individuals experience a world of insufficiency. Seeking to identify ourselves, we encounter myriad models for emulation, either on our travels through the public spaces of modernity--airports, avenues, stores--or through exposure to film, print, video, or audio representations, or both. Whole industries dealing in fashion, advertising, and entertainment are devoted to keeping these images continually before us. Where there is enjoyment to be had in the pursuit of the desires we adopt along with these models, it lies not so much in the enjoyment of the things we accumulate--though there is that, if time allows--as in imagining ourselves as what we want to be through the possession of these things. But because the models change or are continuously revised, there is no respite from the travail of our imaginings, we never quite get to where we want to be [when the Buddhist argues that there is 'no-self,' this is not quite what she had in mind!].'

In a discourse more congenial to Postrel, she might consider Jon Elster's argument that 'The pleasures of consumption tend to become jaded over time, while the withdrawal symptoms become increasingly more severe. The consumption activity remains attractive not because it provides pleasure, but because it offers release from the withdrawal symptoms. Conversely, the attractions of self-realisation increase over time, as the start-up costs diminish and the gratification from achievement becomes more profound. There are economies of scale in self-realisation, whereas consumption has the converse property.' Please see: Jon Elster, 'Self-realisation in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life,' in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: CUP, 1989), pp. 127-158.

I just wish that people would remember that glamour is a false beauty put in place to hide what is intrinsically not attractive (faries and the like use it to hide their true plain or ugly nature.) That actually still applies to a lot of what's called glamourous today, though most are just as taking in by it as by fairy magic.)

Matt: to her credit, Postrel does note the etymology of the word glamor, as a sort of "bewitchment" arising from occult practices. I think she's trying to recover the concept from its suspect origins...but as you point out, perhaps there's something to trusting the etymology here!

Patrick: I love the Elster point on consumption. I think that once one gets on the consumption "treadmill," it can become very hard to stop. And of course whatever "distinguishes" oneself usually tends to just leave everyone else looking less appealing in comparison.

Your comment also makes me think about the dual purpose of a lot of the glam goods Postrel mentions: both to please the owner and to impress others. But as Xenos points out, building on the insights in Girard's Desire, Deceit, and the Novel, so often the former depends intensely on the latter...it's a triangulated desire, entirely dependent on the "hall of mirrors" of others' perceptions.

Finally, Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety is a very nice narrative treatment of these ideas, focusing heavily on literature.

Perhaps we are in a cultural battle over the meaning and initial associations people have with glamor; i would like people to first think of Emma Bovary, conspicous consumption, and vapid fashion editors; Postrel would set up less objectionable products and personages as aspirational.

While glamor is positional, the position need not depend on one's wealth. Because of commercial culture, the poor can become glamor relatively easily compared ages past. Furthermore, nothing in its definition suggests a necessary relationship between glamor and wealth.

While glamor is positional, the position need not depend on one's wealth. Because of commercial culture, the poor can become glamor relatively easily compared ages past. Furthermore, nothing in its definition suggests a necessary relationship between glamor and wealth.

Dear Law Student,

I humbly suggest that you are utterly mistaken as regards the relation between wealth and glamour, as any perusal of the handful of books mentioned above will attest. Of course being wealthy doesn't necessarily mean one is glamorous, but it is at least a necessary condition; and while being relatively or comparatively poor need not mean one can't in some figurative, episodic or evanescent sense, appear 'glamourous' (after all, that's the stuff of great tragi-comedic cinema), glamour in affluent societies is a prerogative of the rich and the near-rich, apart from those creative and envious few adept at pretending to possess the requisite accoutrements of such wealth. Where are those images of glamour in contemporary culture that suggest otherwise? Certainly the poor may desire to be glamourous, but by what criteria (or: who possesses an abundance of symbolic and cultural capital?) do others assess their success at such an endeavor? (And here we might re-read Pierre Bourdieu)

I'm with Patrick here. Things may have gotten a little better since deMaupassant's The Necklace.

[http://www.amlit.com/deMaupassant/SS/TheNecklace.html]

But overall, trying to "keep up with the Jones's glamour" today is hard, and ever harder as income inequality increases. The price of a glamorous place in Brooklyn these days? About $2.5 million:

http://nymag.com/realestate/vu/2007/04/30324/

Oh, that's what you mean by glamorous. I don't find those people glamorous. I just think they're rich and envied by some.

Oh, that's what you mean by glamorous. I don't find those people glamorous. I just think they're rich and envied by some.