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Glamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience's hopes and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough distance to sustain the fantasy.
Virginia Postrel
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Glamour transforms reality to evoke emotions and aspirations, making dreams feel within reach while keeping a sense of fantasy.

Virginia Postrel's quote elaborates on the concept of glamour as a creative process that stirs specific emotional reactions in people. It highlights how glamour combines projection and longing to evoke admiration and aspiration, ultimately making the audience's dreams seem attainable yet simultaneously preserving an enchanting distance that nourishes the fantasy of those dreams.

Themes

GlamourAspirationFantasyDreamsAdmiration

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a speech about the impact of fashion and beauty on society.

More from Virginia Postrel

In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.
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Glamour doesn’t just happen, people don’t wake up in the morning glamorous.
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With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art.
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A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you'll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect your taste for unique architecture, you'll write screeds against philistine mass culture.
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Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle of most statistical distributions. But there are lots of bell curves, and pretty much everyone is on a tail of at least one of them. We may collect strange memorabilia or read esoteric books, hold unusual religious beliefs or wear odd-sized shoes, suffer rare diseases or enjoy obscure movies.
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'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.
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