Secrets of Glamour

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 270, 13 November 1937, Page 7 (Supplement)

Secrets of Glamour

By KAY MATHERS.

ONCE upon a time women were either born beautiful or they weren't. If they weren't, there wasn't much they could do about it. Now there is too much they can do about it, and feminine beauty has become a drug on the attraction market. Any woman can acquire at least an impression of beauty if she sets her mind to it.

Massage and scientific exercise can remodel her figure. Machines that look like a survival of the Inquisition can give her gleaming curls, becoming waves or smart swirls. She can refurbish a faded facade or buy the colour Nature forgot to give her, at the corner drug store. She can even, should she so wish, go to a plastic surgeon and have a whole new face modelled.

No Longer Rare, No Longer News

Beauty is no longer rare, so beauty i« no longer news. Women must seek something greater, and that they do shows that there is truth in that old. German proverb: "He hath injured fair lady that beholds her not."

For a woman will undergo torture, will even Study psychology, to be noticed. The world is weary of pretty girls, is surfeited with them, so the pretty girls have dropped their search for beauty and gone in for glamour.

Business is good in Hollywood because glamour is manufactured there by the celluloid yard. Consider the star. Suppose she already has glamour—languorous movements, hands like white flowers, gorgeous eyes, a figure like a, ftylph, mystery surrounding her life. So far so good, but how to put it over in black and white?

Screen clothes require careful choosing of materials. "Sheer fragility helps to create thrft glantorous •effect," Bays Hollywood.

Even though it does not show, however, colour has its important place in the Hollywood glamour factories. White means glamour destruction if it is worn before a camera. So your movie actress wears light blue instead. Red will not pass the movie dress designer either, unless he ardently dislikes the star for whom his creation is planned. Bed is too harsh. He will probably use French blue instead. It reproduces as a soft, flattering grey.

Perhaps Glamour Is Mostly Mystery

Perhaps glamour is mystery. When you talk about a woman who has glamour, nine times out of ten you are thinking of a chorus girl, a famous model or a movie star. They are far enough away in most cases, and when they aren't it .is surprising how glamour recedes in ratio to the receding distance between.

A model's glamour is a good beginning plus the genius of the middleman — or artist or photographer or whatever you want to call him. Anyhow, both chorus girl and model have the advantage of colour, in which mystery has always lain. But the movie star is different. Often not glamorous herself, she must yet be the essence of it, for &he represents nearly everything that is known about the creation and effect of it.

No need to tell the average woman that, however. No sooner has Garbo had a new hair mode than you see it reproduced on thousands who bear the vaguest resemblance to her. A few weeks after a picture in which new clothes styles are introduced one sees their replicas in the world's ballrooms.

The hours of worry put in by the couturiers, cutters, fitters and cameramen have had far-reaching effects. They have made glamour into news.