May 27th, 2010

Press Clipping: Fashion Quarterly Winter 2010

GLAM SLAM

If there was a World Cup for dressing glamorously, New Zealanders would be eliminated in the first round. Why, asks Cathrin Schaer, are we so reluctant to get dolled up?

In a small cupboard above a designer boutique in Auckland, hidden treasure is hanging. Gowns covered in sequins, ruffles and lace, frocks that are strapless, shoulderless and shameless and dresses that took every trick in a seamstress’ book to conjure up.

The couture-like creations draw gasps from anyone who discovers them upstairs at the Carlson boutique on Ponsonby Road.  “These are amazing,” one woman gushes as she molests the fluttering silks and crushed velvets. “So amazing. What are they doing here? Does anyone ever wear them?”

The designer herself – Tanya Carlson - just nods her head. This is the standard reaction from people who get to see the one-off ball gowns, wedding dresses, and cocktail frocks she  has made in the past. A few fashion weeks ago, Australian boutique owner Elizabeth Charles, who runs two exclusive US stores   specialising in Antipodean designer clothing  visited Carlson’s workroom, saw the dresses and asked the designer what on earth such beauties were doing “in a place like this.” “She told me, “you should be making these in LA”,” Carlson recalls. Because there were plenty of customers for that sort of glamour in California, the retailer told the designer. “I don’t make [these kinds of dresses] unless they have been commissioned,” Carlson continues. “I’ve worn a couple of them myself – to fancy dress parties mainly. And they have been lent out for film shoots or hired out for events, like film premieres. They have been taken overseas too, to be worn at glamorous events – because you just don’t get that level of dressing up here.”

 Carlson says New Zealand women just don’t dress up as much as some other nations. As a rule, we are not a particularly glamorous bunch.

And there are some fairly straightforward reasons for this. Firstly we don’t have that many events that require that much dressing up. “Glamour for New Zealanders is usually what people look like at the horse races or at a wedding,” remarks Greg Murrell, well-travelled owner of Auckland hair salon, Ryder, whose former position as the creative director of international hair product firm, KMS, has seen him attending – and styling hair at - glamorous functions and fashion shows all around the world. “And I think its best left there. We don’t have the urban density of many countries; we don’t have the centuries old tradition of urban promenading.” By this, Murrell means the traditional walk, and socialising, around a city square that takes place in warmer countries such as those of South America, where it’s all about showing off to, and gossiping about, the neighbours.

 Showing off  is traditionally anathema to your average New Zealander. Carlson believes this is why, generally, a lot of folks react badly to the styles displayed by some of our more dressed up socialites .  It just seems a tad too, too much.

Murrell has his own theories on the national anti-dress ups attitude. “I think it is true that most New Zealanders don’t want to stand out from the crowd. And I think that’s a result of our egalitarian heritage.” But he doesn’t mind. “I think it suits us to be like that. We are a pragmatic, practical people,” he concludes.

“Uber-casual,” is how local fashion stylist, Ana MacDonald puts it. “We are just a very practical race. It’s that Number 8 fencing wire thing.” Additionally MacDonald points out that it is more difficult to get hold of the outfits one might categorise as wildly glamorous – they’re not something our local labels usually specialise in.

 But should the whole nation be written off as a bunch of tracksuit pant-loving, sequin-hating, jandal-clad frumps? Will New Zealand women ever work out how to “dress up”? And finally, does it actually matter? Does anyone care whether New Zealanders are glamorous or not?

To find the answer to that question, it might be a good idea to go back. Way back. To the origins of glamour, in fact.

 Linguistically at least, glamour originally comes from somewhere equally unglamorous: ancient Scottish. In that language, the original words - grammaye, grammar, grimoire and glomery – all meant something along the lines of an enchantment or a spell. A later version of these, glamer, meant “the influence of a charm on the eye.”

In his 2008 book, Glamour: A History, Stephen Gundle returns to the first use of the word in a poem by Sir Walter Scott. In the 1805 poem, Scott wrote that: “Glamour … could make a ladye seem a knight, the cobweb on a dungeon wall seem tapestry in a lordly hall,” and “a nut-shell seem a gilded barge.”

Gundle, who is a professor of film and television studies at Warwick University in the UK, writes that glamour is “a magical power capable of making ordinary people, dwellings and places seem like magnificent versions of themselves. From its origins,” he explains, “glamour has been associated with dreaming”.

Charting the history of glamour in a review of Gundle’s book, Pamela Church Gibson, of the London College of Fashion, reports that glamour emerged “with the transfer of power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, the role of the modern city as a site of social display, and the new culture of spectacle and consumption that followed the Industrial Revolution and political upheavals of the 18th century.”

What she means by this is that when  peasants made it to the big city, they had more reason (lots of people they didn’t know but wished to) and more opportunity (more social events outside the family) than ever to impress strangers. And they could do this by dressing up, by being more glamorous.

It was all about the democratization of glamour and Gundle provides some interesting examples from French history. He says that, no matter what you and Sofia Coppola might think, the French queen Marie Antoinette was not glamorous. She had no reason to be – she was an aristocrat who was born to cake eating and collecting silk shoes and, accordingly, she didn’t need to impress anyone. It was simply her birthright. She never felt that she had to charm anyone’s eye – even though it meant that she lost her head in 1793 as a result of the French Revolution against local aristocracy.

Marie Antoinette may not have thought she needed towin overher public but  Napoleon Bonaparte did and he used glamour to do so. The son of a lawyer, Bonaparte was a militarily-gifted upstart who came to rule France as self-proclaimed “Emperor” after Marie Antoinette and her aristocratic relatives had been so mercilessly disposed of. Bonaparte, Gundle says, fabricated his own myth  by arranging for grand and glamorous spectacles, which convinced the general public that he really was a worthy emperor. Another historian points out that Bonaparte was a forerunner of today’s celebrities – his fame was all about the cult of the individual. Additionally Bonaparte bound glamour up with fashion: The diminutive French fighter loved fashion and wanted to make Paris the most beautiful city in the world – in part because he wanted to keep the citizens occupied and compliant. So he did things like forbid ladies at court to wear the same dress more than once as well as blocking the fireplaces in his palace. All this meant that Frenchwomen needed more clothes – which supported a burgeoning French textile and fashion industry.

 “Glamour is a weapon and a protective coating,” Gundle concludes in his book. “The element of pretend or make-believe is a crucial part of the illusion.”

Another academic, Judith Brown, agrees. In her 2009 book, Glamour in Six Dimensions, the professor of English literature at Indiana University in the USA, defines modern glamour as a sort of disguise. It “relies on abstraction, on the thing transformed into idea and therefore the loss of the thing itself,” she writes. Brown also points out how much our definition of glamour has changed over time. At one stage it was a quality considered closer to beauty, with beauty defined as something true and natural. But over time glamour has become more artificial, more excessive and now it also has a very strong relationship with consumption (as in, it encourages us to want more).  “Glamour requires a kind of beauty - but it has no bearing on truth,” Brown writes.

You get the feeling that it might  be good that New Zealanders are not as glamorous as those in Napoleon’s court.

In the current recessionary and environmentally conscious mood, pundits have even been talking about the end of glamour. English newspaper, The Daily Telegraph recently ran an interview with Joan Collins in which the aging glamourpuss bemoaned the fact that ladies don’t dress up the way they used to. But  the  the lack of posh frocks isn’t so much about slipping standards. It has more to do with a changing culture, changing lifestyles and even advances wrought by feminism. 

Take into account the increasingly casual nature of our wardrobes, the fact that we spend more time socialising online (and therefore don’t need to dress up all the time),and a feeling that we no longer need to maintain some sort of sartorial illusion for our nearest and dearest, greeting hubby at the door, dressed in a cocktail frock and carrying his slippers and pipe for example. Consider also that when it comes to the Hollywood kind of glamour, there’s no longer a lot of mystery involved, mystery being a big part of the spell cast by glamour. When Hollywood first started presenting its young starlets as glamorous, they were able to strictly control their stars’ images, changing everything from a pretty girl’s name to her wardrobe. These days, there’s not much that’s mysterious about trackpant-clad celebrity photographed, makeup-less, slurping on a thick shake in the local supermarket carpark.

Could it be that a new, modern definition of glamour is called for this century, one that involves bewitching but also has a basis in real beauty? Rather than focussing on fuss and the impact an outrageous designer label has on onlookers, it may be worth considering the simpler things that can make anyone feel glamorous – a pair of high heeled shoes, some jewellery, a silk scarf.

“Glamour is in the eye of the beholder,” argues MacDonald. “For some people, they could be wearing a dress from Glasson’s – and if they feel glamorous, then they project that.”

And Murrell is quick to point out the difference between glamour and fashion. While New Zealand may not be as glamorous as other nations, that doesn’t mean we’re not interested in fashion. “Serious glamour does not sit well with our national psyche. Here we have a simpler, more laidback style and I think that many people do that very well. And that can be just as interesting. Glamour to me is when someone has made an effort to transcend the way that they look every day,” says  Murrell . “Not every part of a person’s appearance needs to be scaled up - restraint is a fine thing. To me, glamour isn’t about money, it’s about individual personal style .”

“We prefer a more subtle glamour,” Carlson agrees – and that’s no matter how many visitors end up awestruck by the hidden, hanging treasures she occasionally makes.