Virginia Postrel joins us to talk about her new book, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. We talk about the uses and abuses of glamour, the nerd fixation on space travel, the first known symbol of glamour, how Barack Obama's first election campaign was heaven-sent for Ms. Postrel's book, and more!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 26 - Glamour Profession
(upbeat music) - Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes or visit our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm to find past episodes. We're also on Facebook at Facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow on Twitter at VMSPod and on Tumblr at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. I'm recording this week's intro from a hotel in San Antonio. I'm here for the annual meeting of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, the AAPS for insiders, which is part of my day job. It's not the most glamorous of fields. Everybody's willing to admit, even within pharma, but what these guys do is necessary for actually making the drugs that the R&D departments come up with. In other words, without them, you're not getting any of your Lipitor or anything else that you're taking. And glamor, which is my horrible segue, is the topic of our episode this week. Our guest is Virginia Pastrell, who just published a new book, The Power of Glamour, Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion from Simon and Schuster last week. Glamour is something a lot of us don't think too much about, but it does have a pretty significant influence on people's lives. Even those of us who like to think we're immune to its effects. I mean, I like to think I'm not susceptible to any sort of great evocative imagery, but I know I'm just as bad as anyone else. It's a really good book, The Power of Glamour. I found it utterly fascinating. Both in the way Miss Pastrell kind of breaks down glamour in order to understand how it works, as well as in her explorations of its history and its power, its uses both good and bad over the millennia. She actually goes back a couple thousand years to show what might be the first known influence, the first known episode of Glamour influencing a significant figure. Now Virginia Pastrell is an author, columnist and speaker whose work spans a pretty broad range of topics from social science to fashion, concentrating on the intersection of culture and commerce. And we actually go into sort of the through line of much of her work during our conversation. In addition to The Power of Glamour, she's also written two other books, The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. I've read all three and recommend them all pretty heartily. Miss Pastrell is a regular columnist for Bloomberg View and was the editor of Reason Magazine for more than a decade. And now, the virtual memories conversation with Virginia Pastrell. (upbeat music) - As I started thinking about glamour and sort of delving into the subject. One thing that became clear sort of early on is that glamour is not a style. Because there are too many things that are glamorous that have nothing aesthetically in common. Nothing obvious. So there are glamorous individual people. Some of those people are quite different from each other. I mean, what does Grace Kelley have in common with James Bond or Amelia Earhart? There are glamorous places. Paris is glamorous to many people. Italy is glamorous, but then so are all kinds of vacation resorts. The beach chairs facing the ocean. What do those things have in common with a classic E type jaguar or with champagne? There are many things we can think of that are glamorous. Some of which are luxury. Some of which are not luxury. Some of which are people. Some of which are things are places. Glamorous ideas. So what I tried to do is say, okay, what kind of thing is glamour if it's not a style? And what the conclusion I came to was that glamour is like humour. Glamour is something that arises in communication. There's an audience and there's an object. There's somebody who is responsive and there's something that they find glamorous. And in that exchange, in the same way, in an exchange where there's an object and that's humorous and an audience that finds it funny, a distinctive emotion arises. And in the case of glamour instead of amusement as with humour, that emotion is a sense of projection and longing. So glamour is an imaginative process, a form of communication, a form of rhetoric and persuasion that relies not so much on words as on images. There may be word pictures, but it's primarily non-verbal. And it elicits the sense of longing. Projection and longing. And then I went further and again looking across things that were glamorous across times, cultures, different audiences, trying to find common elements that they had. And then as I delve into that, I did find that while things like, you know, shiny furniture or satin dresses, those are very superficial. Those are not the things that define glamour. There are elements that define glamour. One is a promise of escape and transformation. A different better life and different better circumstances. Whether that's imagining yourself on the beach, relaxing or at a really exciting party, getting into the hottest club. And when you think about those, those are very different things. But they appeal to different audiences with different longings. So there's the promise of escape and transformation. There's always an element of grace. Glamour always has an element of illusion. And that illusion lies in hiding costs, flaws, distractions, anything that could detract from our projection into this sort of sense of the ideal. And then the third element that all glamour has is mystery. And the mystery has two functions. One is to help the grace because you can't see everything. You can hide things. And the other is to draw you in. Something that's mysterious or distant is intriguing. We want to know more. We want to be there. And that encourages projection. Do you consider the longing to be the thing that evoked glamour or glamour to be the thing that evoked longing? And I know it's a chicken or egg question. Well, it's actually-- I actually have an answer to that. It's a little complicated, actually. And it's something that you have to think through. What is actually the case is there's sort of an in-coa desire that you maybe-- let's say you wish you could be more recognized and respected. And there's this kind of in-coa desire. You don't necessarily dwell on it, or maybe you do. But you don't picture how it could happen. And then along comes something that you find glamorous. And in that interaction where you have this sense of projection and longing, that otherwise in-coa desire becomes more focused. And it becomes if only I could be there. If only I could have that job. If only I could drive that car, that takes that in-coa longing. It intensifies and focuses it. And it embodies it in something glamorous. That then also translates that longing into some more specific sense of escape and transformation. So that the longing is there in some sense before. But in the process of glamor, it becomes more specific. In a sense, glamor helps us to find it. Glamor helps us to find it, yes, yes. Do you find differences between male and female glamor? I think often throughout the book, there were moments where I had to step back from the idea of glamor as opposed to simply advertising and the sort of more crass way of trying to create a desire as opposed to a deeper longing. And it occurred to me in the process of that, that with women, at least the advertising can be for these more specific accessory makeup, et cetera. With men, there's a more difficult-- That's a different thing. It's a bigger thing. It's usually some something. There's a lot of car advertising that's all about the glamor and anything. It's going to be the $50,000 car or-- And there's also-- there's a lot of advertising for men that is about being in certain environments. The cheap beer that gets you to run a lot of things. Exactly. I mean, those aren't necessarily glamorous appeals, but-- We're recording on a Sunday where there's a lot of NFL advertising going on. Right. Well, one thing that I realized in sort of gender studies, there's a lot of discussion about the male gaze and all of that. And this is a book that is written by a woman so that I am more attuned to things that women find glamorous-- when I see a glamorous woman, I see her with a woman's eyes, not with a man's eyes, so that I am more likely to imagine being with her than being with her, sort of being in that situation. And there are also things in general-- I see things with a woman's eyes. I also see things with kind of a nerd's eyes. So I can really understand the Glamour Star Trek or the space program. That sort of thing for a specific audience. I don't think-- the difference between men and women is different from the relationship between glamour and advertising. Glamour is one of the tools that advertisers or marketers or branding people can use one of the many or they can-- or I should really say can try to-- It's very difficult to be. Because if it works great, but the thing about glamour is just like humor. You can try to write jokes, but if people don't find them funny, they're not going to work. And the same thing is true with glamour that is sort of manufactured, whether usually but not entirely, usually for commercial purposes, where people are trying to create glamour to make the audience feel certain ways in order to get them to buy things or go to movies or whatever. Now, there are two elements of that. One is it may not work. And the other is the people may feel the thing is glamours, but they may not buy it. You know, there's a lot of that. There are lots of things that I find glamours I see glamour adds. I enjoy that feeling that they evoke, but I'm not going to buy those things. I spent my 40th birthday over at the Tom Ford store on the Upper East Side, looking around aspirationally. I think this is all very lovely. I will never buy anything here, but this is wonderful. Right, right, and then there are other things, like glamour places that you're not going to go to just because it's not practical. I mean, you're busy, you don't have a glamour's private jet. You can't just jet off. So that's another thing. Going back to the male-female thing, I do think that it's very important for people to understand that glamour is not intrinsically female or feminine. In the first chapter, I talk about how one of the earliest uses of the term glamour, as we use it today, was in the phrase glamour of battle. That military glamour is one of the oldest and most potent forms of glamour, whether it's the glamour of being in the military, which is appeals to desires for a camaraderie, for masculine prowess, although obviously women are in the military now as well, for patriotic significance, lots of different desires that are channeled that way, and a lot of military recruiting imagery uses the various tropes that old Hollywood used to, strong lights and shadows, strong sense of mystery, the grace is there. So there's that type of military glamour. There's also the idea of military action in a more collective form, as opposed to the glamour of being joining the ranks. There is also glamour around that. A lot of countries have gone to war over many thousands of years, because they had a glamorous idea of what that would be like, what it's meaning. That couldn't happen nowadays. Right, exactly, couldn't possibly happen now. And obviously, that's not the only factor, but it is a major way that people get into these things. And there's certainly nothing particularly feminine about that, let alone. And it's not commercial, primarily, either. I mean, glamour is a form of persuasion, nonverbal persuasion. And it can be used to sell all kinds of things, and not just commercial products. And I can sell religion, it can sell political ideas, it can sell military intervention, which I suppose you'd call political idea, can sell national-- I don't know what you call the American dream, but that's a glamorous idea. You began writing the book around the time of Obama's first run in 2008. What did that campaign teach you about glamour? I used to say that campaign was God's gift to my book project, because we're in a period where there aren't a whole lot of glamorous movie stars, say. And Barack Obama in 2008 was an intensely glamorous figure. He was somebody who was mysterious. He had this exotic background, not too exotic, not completely alien. This is a thing glamour. The mystery is neither transparent nor opaque. It's translucent. It has to be enough that you can identify. So he was exotic, but not too exotic, it was perfect. A little mysterious, very self-contained sort of personality, sort of graceful in his movements, and his presentation, and wasn't a whole lot known about him. So that helped there, too. And most importantly, among his supporters, people projected onto him what it was they wanted in a present, what it was they wanted in a country. And there were people who thought he was a Clinton-style sort of center-left new Democrat. I mean, people knew it was some kind of liberal that much. They knew it, but-- and then there were people who thought he was a radical socialist, and I'm talking about all among his supporters. There were people projected onto him all kinds of things, and they also projected onto him the idea that he would overcome political resistance, somehow politics would magically disappear. Race relations would be suddenly wonderful. I mean, sort of the ultimate glamorous vote for Obama was giving him the Nobel Peace Prize when he hadn't done anything yet. He had just been himself, and people projected onto him this notion that he would be this great peacemaker, because somehow he embodied that. And that's very unusual in politics. It is very unusual to have glamorous politicians. It's very common to have charismatic politicians. And Obama has a certain amount of charisma, but that's not really his distinguishing quality. And the reason it's very unusual to have politicians who are glamorous is that when you get an office, you have to make decisions, and you have to disappoint people. And that sort of-- Fill in the gap. Fill in the gaps, and that grace, and mystery, and all that disappears. And of course, Obama's terms in office have shown the erosion of his glamour. It doesn't mean that people hated him. He lost all his support. But that kind of idealized vision of him, and that projection of all your hopes and dreams onto this individual, has mostly vanished. And a lot of his support now comes from people who don't like his opponents. Which is a significant voting block, as well as the point pointed out in 2012. That can get you reelected. It worked perfectly fine for him. What did you learn about glamour over the process of this, and sort of about yourself and your relation to how it's affected you? I mean, I learned pretty much everything about glamour, which is to say that when I started out, when I first started writing about glamour, before I was writing the book, I really didn't know anything about glamour. So it's all quite a learning process. In terms of developing rhetoric, and an understanding of what it is? Yeah, in terms of understanding what it is, in terms of understanding its history, in terms of analyzing the different elements of it, and the different ways. I mean, this book has a lot of-- there are three elements. There within grace, there are two types of grace. There are three types of mysteries. There's a lot of these typologies that help me think through how these things operate. And I hope that the book, in addition to being a fun sort of thing to read, will also give people a kind of intellectual infrastructure that helps them think about glamour, and persuasion, imagery, as well. Yeah, what did I learn? I mean, you can't be glamrs to yourself. And I don't know that-- I mean, I know myself pretty well. So I suppose that I didn't learn a whole lot about myself, except in so far as I'm able to be quite fascinated with this subject. And when I started out, I really thought of myself as somebody who was not only unglamorous-- because you don't think of yourself as glamorous ever-- but as somebody who was interested in the unglamorous side of life. Because I am interested in the nitty-gritty details of how things get done. I'm interested in supply chain management. I've written about operations research and factory redesign and things like that. And I recently wrote this piece for Bloomberg View about how this glamour of what's in TV tropes, the website TV tropes, calls the magical database. We have this glamorous idea of what databases can be. The CSI guys can get all the information they need. Exactly. The CSI guys just have everything at their fingertips. And it's all very lit dramatically. And I'm not a programmer. I just say at least I mean I've done some HTML kind of programming, but not much. But I do have some concept of how complicated that sort of project is. This is as the White House has learned now. And so when I see something like the White House obviously being surprised by how difficult a project it was to come up with that, I think that they and the public were enamored, that were bewitched by this database glamour, this IT glamour, and it's partly because of the media portrayals of what you can do with computers. And it's partly because we do live in an era where technologists have done amazing things and have often quite deliberately hidden how difficult those problems were to solve. So my sensitivity to that glamour sort of reflects not just my interest in glamour, but also my interest in the unglamorous side of things. And similarly, I've always tried to look behind the curtain and I always thought I was somehow not as susceptible to these things. But you realize you're just as susceptible to types of glamour as the standard. Yeah, I mean a lot of-- I think if people read this book, if they go into this book thinking, oh glamour, that's for other people, everyone is susceptible to some kind of glamour. There is nobody who is not. I really can't prove that, but I have a strong working hypothesis. It's just a matter of what kind of glamour are you susceptible to. So there's a technological glamour. There is a glamour of the intellectual life. There is-- did a video interview with Glenn Reynolds from Instapunded. And we talked a lot about the glamour of space travel, which was what he found glamour in his youth and to some degree today. And as did I, we talked about how these billionaires are now all using their billions for their space programs and that's because, especially for people of a certain age who were young during the height of the sort of space fever, that was very, very glamorous. And it continues to have that lure. Because we're all in the gutter, but-- Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly right. What appealed to you particularly? What was glamorous to you when you were young that isn't glamorous now? Or how did you change in relation to what you find glamorous? Well, actually, I mean, when I was very I said in that interview, and that the very first thing-- looking back my earliest childhood, my ideas of what was glamorous, I really was enamored of this book, You Will Go to the Moon. And so that was very glamorous. I also love the Wizard of Oz, which is a classic. There's a lot of glamour going on there. And nowadays I am over that space trouble, actually. That continued well into my 20s. But I am now-- I really like it on Earth, and I like it with-- I live in Los Angeles. I like to live in a climate-controlled empire. Where the natural climate is nice. I don't want to go to Mars and freeze. Maybe I've edited back in all of the realities of that. The whole sort of frontier idea, I've realized that I actually would probably be the people staying back in the old country, or staying on the east coast and not going with the pioneers. That's just a sort of a glamorous idea, and I like civilization. Do you have a through line that you see throughout your books? I know a substance of style, in a sense. Yeah, no, no, no, I do. There are a couple of ways of thinking of it. One is just that the books are about, or a major element in all three books, is where does economic value come from? Where-- what are the drivers of economic progress of discovering things that are increasingly valuable to people? So in the future and its enemies, I talk mostly about the functional things. And I use this line, form follows failure, the idea of incremental progress, seeing what you have, being dissatisfied with it, and making improvements, which does not necessarily mean products, although Henry Petroski, who coined that term, was thinking about artifacts. It could be institutions. But that's more of a functional concept than in the substance of style, I talk about the value of pleasure and meaning, and specifically relating to the look and feel of people, places, and things as a driver of new forms of economic value. And when I talk about meaning there, I'm primarily talking about meaning as identity, standing out and fitting in. So the phrase is, I like that pleasure, I'm like that meaning. And then in the power of glamour, it's sort of in some ways a deeper idea of meaning, which is where you're really projecting deeper longings onto something, not just about signaling something about yourself, but to the world, but rather sort of talking more to yourself about sort of who you are and what you desire. So that's sort of the economic thing that binds them all together. The more sort of intellectual thing or the way that it relates, even to my work as editor reason, is they're all continuations of this longer classical liberal tradition that goes back to the 18th century to people like Adam Smith and David Hume. Now I'm not worthy to tie David Hume's shoes or whatever. But those thinkers were interested in the economy, how it worked. They were interested in the role of the state. But they were interested in much more than that. And fundamentally, they were interested in the human imagination and in sort of how human beings create a meaningful world around them and relate to each other and how, what it means to be in sort of a civilized social order and particularly within the context of a commercial and liberal society. And so all three of my books are also about that. And they're very much in that intellectual tradition, which is related to but different from the modern libertarian tradition that is specifically about the role of the state. Because the role of the state is just a little tiny piece of all of that. I was going to say, does that cause any rift with your libertarian? You know, I'm an empiricist and I have broad interests. I don't have-- it doesn't cause rifts in the sense of fights. I mean, there are people who might have been more interested when I was writing specifically about-- Dynamism and-- About-- but even calling it dynamism, as opposed to being narrowly-- puts it in that tradition that it's about this sort of broader social context. So the question is what kinds of rules in terms of the political order foster this process of learning and discovery, which is a different way of thinking about the political order from just thinking the state should be as small as possible. I mean, there is a lot of overlaps, but it's just a different way of approaching it. Now, one of the points of glamour you bring up near the end of the book is the glamour of terrorism, which on your way out here from the West Coast, you almost walked into an airport that was-- I don't think that guy was a terrorist. I think he was a little-- But in this, or not, I have sensed the idea of trying to make your great statement. Right, right. What do you-- how do you see the positive and the negative uses of glamour? This is interesting. People often ask me, is glamour good or is it bad? And they'll read one thing I've written and they'll decide, she likes glamour or she doesn't like glamour. She's defending glamour. She's attacking glamour. And actually, what I think about glamour is what I think about all forms of rhetoric, which is that it can be either good or bad. And if you want to talk about the ways it's problematic, there are two different ways in which it can be problematic. One is it can be used for bad purposes, either deliberately or unintentionally, which is it can foster things like terrorism or it can persuade people to get on board with Italian fascism. I mean, they use glamour or it can be used for something that is itself a bad goal or it leads to a bad outcome. The other way it can be, I would say, problematic, maybe not bad, is that in creating this illusion and hiding the costs and difficulties and distractions that might detract from glamour, it can push people in a certain direction. They can make decisions in their lives, whether it's about what career to pursue or where to live or collectively, what public works to undertake. And if you make those decisions without editing back in all of those things that get left out, you are in for trouble one way or the other. And it can be as minor as you forgot about jet lag when you plan your vacation to as major as, you know, you had these glamorous pictures of how in the highways of the future, everything, all the traffic would flow smoothly. But you forgot about, you know, all the houses, you were going to have to tear down in order to build those or you forgot that in order to justify the cost, you were going to have to have a lot more traffic than you see in those pictures and say, you know, traffic jams and the same thing happens with high speed rail. You know, you tell people we build this high speed rail, you'll get wherever you want to go with no trouble, but then if it's in order to justify the cost, you know, everybody's got to be on it, but everybody's picturing the other people going on it. There's a lot of that kind of thing. And there's a lot of glamour in architectural renderings and the way public works projects are presented. And that's not to say that they're never justified. It's just to say, you know, don't just believe the rendering. You have to think about how would the wind, you know, sweep across that plaza? Is this going, it looks great in the picture, but is this going to be a place that people actually want to be? >> Or in our case, we also have the building that melts cars, the one that's reflecting the sun in a perfect-- >> Oh, really? I don't know about this. >> I think it's in the city here in New York. Yeah, it's just inconveniently located where the sun manages to bounce off of it and has slowly been melting a car over the last couple of months. Do you see-- I don't know, you don't make any prescriptions within the book, but strategies for sort of that sense of self-correction and ways of-- or do you think that's simply an inherent part of-- >> Well, I think the first thing is if you are aware that what is going on is glamour, you know? And so people are, you know, people are more or less aware of that depending on the context. Partly, you know, people are much more aware of it if they're thinking about high-heeled shoes than if they're thinking about high-speed rail, you know? But it's the same thing. Or-- so one thing is to just heighten people's awareness of the process, which I think helps people enjoy it too. But then, if you're aware, then you can sit down and think in a really systematic way about, well, what's being left out? Am I going to-- you know, I'm going to be disappointed, which way is I'm going to be disappointed? And that's, you know, what I say over it is only can be-- glamour can only be a guide. It can't be the destination. It can't be, you know, the-- it is something that is situated in an unreal world of the ideal. And so it can point you in a valuable direction. But you're going to have to make adjustments to make that turn into something. And that may be as simple as, you know, when Oprah Winfrey was a teenager, she was just enraptured by the Mary Tyler Moore show. Which is a funny thing to find glamorous, but she did. And if you understand the circumstances of her life, you can sort of see why that would be. Because these were people who were in, you know, safe and collegial, and they were all smart and pretty and, you know-- >> Like that dreamy Ed Astner. >> Right. Okay, they weren't all pretty, but, you know, Mary Tyler Moore, Mary Richards was stylish and smart. She was smart and pretty, which, you know, if you were Oprah Winfrey as a young woman, that would be-- anyway, so she dreamed of being a TV newswoman. And she became a TV newswoman. And after a good start, she completely flopped as a TV newswoman. Because her real-- her, you know, her skills were-- she was good on camera, but not as an anchor woman or not as a newswoman. It was when she found this talk show host role. So it pointed her in the right direction, but she had to make some adjustments in order for it to really mesh for this ideal to mesh with who she really was. And of course, it was fabulous, at least successful, eventually. >> So you find that escape and transformation notion to be the, I guess, the most positive use of glamour in that respect? >> Well, the escape and transformation is always part of glamour, because one of those essential elements. So if you are in bad circumstances, glamour can either just give you a kind of psychological refuge, or it can potentially point ways out of it, out of those circumstances. I think it's probably more common to be just a temporary refuge, sort of an imaginative respite. But there are people who use it as a way out. And then, of course, it's not only people in bad circumstances. It could just be, you know, young people thinking about careers and their-- >> In fact, the first one you bring up or the proto use of glamour within the book is Alexander the Great idolizing Achilles, from The Odyssey, which is actually a non-visual use, which I was going to-- >> Well, well-- >> I found a passage within the book that, you know, kind of allow-- I found a waiver within your definition of glamour that makes that cool. But yeah, I did find it interesting, that notion of Achilles, this image in poetry and history in those-- >> Well, there are lots of images of Achilles as well, the actual, and there are verbal pictures. So, yes, there is a waiver that in so far as you have these sort of mental images that are conjured by words, but it's not persuasion in the way that we think about. When we think about verbal persuasion, we think about things like syllogisms or, you know, where it's a more of abstract. This is about sort of images and emotions. And it's also not narrative. So, it's neither sort of a logical type of persuasion, nor a storytelling type. It may be embedded within a story. People have sort of scenes in movies. The movie is a story, but the-- >> Iconic sort of-- >> Yeah, right. And interestingly, often those scenes weren't really in that movie. They were just stills that were released for publicity photos. With Alexander and Achilles, Alexander took-- I do say he's-- Achilles is the first person we can say was glamorous to someone in particular, because he was glamorous to Alexander. And Alexander, you know, recreated certain scenes in so far as he could. I would argue that that is sort of an imagistic thing. I don't use pictures of Achilles in the book because the pictures of Achilles will not look glamorous to today's audience. It's not that they wouldn't have looked glamorous to. It's the same thing with a lot of the Japanese prints from the Edo period. They don't look glamorous to Western contemporary eyes, because the styles of art are too different. And this is an issue. I mean, you know, I can see that they are glamorous because of certain characteristics that we know and the way they were used in the culture. But they don't necessarily appear glamorous to us, because we have-- our eyes are trained in different sorts of visual imagery. But you also characterized that well in the book where what's upon a time divorce was seen as a glamorous thing and now divorce is seen as essentially, you know-- Right, well, that's a whole-- Yeah, that's a different-- yeah, there are two different things. One is-- what is glamorous can change? I was just talking about art styles. You know, so we see pictures of Alexander who was the most depicted guy in the ancient world pretty much. And he does do the glamour thing. I mean, he develops certain visual tropes that are used to this day, you know, the melting gaze upward towards the future or whatever. But yes, definitely. I mean, things that used to be glamorous become unglamorous. Sometimes they then become glamorous again. You know, smoking used to be glamorous in the first chapter. I have these icon sidebars in the first chapter. One of them is about smoking. So smoking was glamorous. It was glamorous in a lot of different ways. It had a lot of different meanings attached to it. But of course, it hid all of these negative qualities, including, you know, Humphrey Bogart died of lung cancer. This is a huge picture of him. So that became very unglamorous. It's taken on a little bit of sort of rebel glamour in some quarters because of all the bands and the people saying you shouldn't do it. But it's still not like it was. As you say, if you watch movies from the '30s, there is something very glamour. Divorce is this glamorous thing that rich people do. It's not always depicted positively. But it has this kind of exotic-- Sort of cachey or luxury. --cachey, exactly. It has a kind of cachey to it. Whereas today, you know, having married parents as glamorous or having sort of having that sort of stability, particularly glamorous to somebody thinking about their parents less necessarily about themselves. You mentioned the side bars within the book and a number of images embedded in it. Reading it, it struck me very much as a physical artifact of a book. Does the e-book thing work for you in particular? Can you try it out as an e-book? There is an e-book of it. I assume. There is an e-book of it. I haven't seen the e-book. OK, so you don't know how it's-- So I don't actually know. I have placed my order for the e-book, but it won't be released until Tuesday. So I don't know. It will have the images. But how they are treated, I really don't know. I'm hoping that you'll be able to enlarge them and really see them. But I don't know. Do you have a particular preference, I guess, for print at all, or are you pretty much-- I bounce back and forth. Yes, as a reader, I use three formats. I have-- there are books I read as e-books. There are books I read in print. And there are books I listen to as audiobooks, primarily novels as audiobooks. And it really depends on the type of book. A book that I want to take a lot of notes on underlying passages, have copies of passages, maybe because I'm going to write about it. e-books work better because I use a Kindle app on an iPad because I can highlight. And then Amazon dumps all those things onto your Kindle highlights page. And then I can cut and paste them. And that works well. I guess as a reading experience, I kind of like the traditional book. But I have so many books in my house that I literally-- and I'm using literal to mean literal. Not exaggerating. I cannot walk in my office in my house, or I can just sort of-- Hop over everything. Yeah, I mean, you can't really use it. So the e-book is a great gift to those of us who have too many books and can't afford a bigger house. But it actually was a moment of the escape and transformation idea of glamour. I spent a good chunk of last year getting a library built in my house largely with the notion of this will be my great refuge and I had that glamorous idea of it. And it came through 100%. It's not one of those things where once I had it, I regret it. No, no, this is pretty much exactly what I want to offer. That's great. Yes, every now and then, the glamour works just exactly. Yeah. Because I ask everybody, what are you reading? What am I reading? Books at least, because I know we're all reading tons of things in life. Right, yeah. It's funny, actually. On this trip, I didn't bring anything because I was going to be so busy. I'm almost finished with a biography of Adam Smith. I've been on this 18th century kick. So I was reading some of Boswell's less well-known diaries. He has his London Journal as the one that I read in college and I reread it when I was doing this book. But there's some other volumes. And I read a big biography of David Hume. And now I'm reading almost done with a shorter than the Hume biography of Adam Smith. So that's what I've been reading lately. Second to last question. And it's a terrible one to ask with your book coming out just now. What's next? I don't know. I assume not, but I forgot to leave it out there. Yeah, I don't know. Probably in the near future, not another book. It would probably be some other type of project. Just because I like to really become very engaged in a topic before I devote the time to write a book. I mean, I spent several years writing where I would occasionally write about glamour before I decided to actually do a book on glamour. So it was like three years before I decided, oh, yeah, I'm going to do that. So supply chain logistics is what you're saying. I actually thought, and seriously, I thought that my next book after the substance of style was going to be a book about a business book, about suppose you want to take this aesthetic imperative seriously. What are the operational implications of that? And it was going to be case studies of companies that are very unglamorous. And for various reasons, I did some stories that were related to that, but for various reasons, some of them having to do with me, and some of them having to do with my publisher, that was not the case. - In my day job, where I'm the editor of a pharmaceutical trade magazine, we focus more on the manufacturing, outsourcing, and things of that, as opposed to the R&D and the glamorous part of pharmaceuticals. And I once asked an executive very high up at a very large pharma company how he felt running the manufacturing or the global supply branch of the company, knowing that he was never going to get the big press. The only time they would talk about him is if he had to shut down a facility because they were-- and he said to me, he said, Gil, we know we don't drive the bus, but the bus doesn't go without us. And that was pretty much all he had to hang his hat on, is they're not going to make the drug. If we're not there, nobody's going to remember that we were the people. Final question, it's just harkening back to something you mentioned earlier. Why do you think there are fewer glamorous movie stars nowadays? Well, I think there are sort of two, maybe three sort of reasons. One is that the one that everyone always says, which is that there's less mystery. And I think that is not because everyone is tweeting, because most movie stars are not. They are not on social media. They are not even in the tabloids most of the time. But there is a different sort of movie star persona that is-- when they're promoting a movie and they're going on talk shows, what kind of person are they presenting themselves as? It's a familiar buddy girl next door kind of persona. And this was true, although we remember a few glamorous figures from the '50s and '60s. I mean, this has actually been true ever since World War II after the war. You know, for the most part, most actors, most Hollywood stars, were not super glamorous. They were just always a few. So that's one reason. And that goes along with certain very strong cultural norms around authenticity and honesty and informality and even comfort and even more and more explicit sexuality. That's sort of it. So that's one reason. And the other is maybe a little more complicated. It has to do with the culture is more fragmented. I talked about this in the last chapter of the book. So that in the 1930s, the aspiration-- people were sharing a certain-- both certain aspirations and certain media figures. And so you could say that person is glamorous and that person is not. And this is why they're glamorous. And you know, Fred Ginger, they're glamorous. Greta Garbo is glamorous, whatever. Now it's harder because different people are glamorous to different audiences than there are fewer. The individual audiences are much smaller. I do think there are glamorous figures today. You know, Kerry Washington, I think, is very glamorous. And interestingly, she is primarily a TV actress. And but the kind of TV role that is today that we have today is a bigger type of role, more like a movie role, than the kind of TV role you had when we called it the small screen. And she very consciously also crafted what she calls red carpet carry. She invented a persona for herself as a style icon. On the red carpet, this sort of personification of a kind of grace and stylishness. And she plays it like a role. And I think that is very much what the old studios used to do with-- you know, somebody else did it for the stars. She had to do it sort of for herself. I mean, she has stylists and stuff. But she had to make the decision that she wanted to do that sort of thing. So you do have-- you know, Kate Blanche, and I talk about something. I think she's glamorous. Angelina Jolie has a kind of glamor. I mean, I think there are glamorous stars. There are fewer-- actually did an interview with somebody the other day. The fewer glamorous male stars than there have been in the past. People starting in the Clooney. Right, right. Yeah. We're in a period where the kind of boy who never grew up is the sort of the male star. And I was doing an interview with a reporter out in LA who was asking about male stars. And I was saying, if a major male star emerges as a glamorous figure, I predict that male star will not be white. Because why people seem to want from their male stars is a lot of fart jokes or something. And so that kind of sort of the more self-contained, graceful master of all situations is a star that is a character who is, I think, less likely to be white today than in the past. One last question I always-- or I have to ask just to find out if I should have given you this. Have you ever read The Leopard by Giuseppe Lumpy? I have not, and I should have. I just sent you a copy of it. And I have also intended to see the version of the movie. Exactly, exactly. I'll mail you a copy. It's one of my faves. But there's a very significant moment within the novel that made me think of a power glending you up. Yeah, no, no. It's totally relevant. It's totally relevant, but I have not read it. Yeah. On the strength of that, we have more reading to do. Virginia Postrell, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. On the count, we dress for action. And that was Virginia Postrell. You can find the power of glamour, longing, and the art of visual persuasion at your favorite bookstore. You should also check out our previous books, The Substance of Style and the Future and Its Enemies, as well as our Bloomberg View columns. In fact, just go to vpostrell.com for all things Australian, that's v-p-o-s-t-r-e-l.com. And that's it for this week's Virtual Memories Show. Come back next week for our conversation with Maxim Jakobowski, a literary editor and erotica author who learned to make the most out of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon. It's a pretty interesting conversation. I think you'll agree when you hear it. Until then, go visit iTunes or chimeraobscura.com/vm and check out past episodes of the show. And if you're at our chimeraobscura.com site, you can also make donations to the show. The show is free. I don't plan on charging forward at any time, but I am running up some expenses in terms of travel and equipment and everything else. So if you'd like to make a donation, that would be great. You can also add yourself to the e-list while you're on the site. And from San Antonio, I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)