OLD HOLLYWOOD GLAMOUR The Latest Fashions Recall Another Era By Melissa Cantor The often inextricable worlds of music and fashion reflect our yearning for a return to a more refined era. When Christina Aguilera wanted to trade her dirrrty-girl pop for more mature-sounding vocals, she recast herself as a modern day pinup girl. With platinum, pin-curled locks and classic satin dresses, she single-handedly revived Old Hollywood Glamour. Fashion icons including Christina Applegate, Lara Flynn Boyle, Brittany Murphy, Salma Hayek, and Scarlett Johanson all showed off their own take on the look on the red carpet, and Gatsby-inspired fashion stories in women’s magazines have been ubiquitous the past few months. While we might be prone to dismiss this trend as arbitrary as any of the others that weave their way through pop culture and in and out of our closets, I’m tempted to read more into it than, say, the resurgence of leggings. This is not just about dark lipstick and curls coming into vogue, as ethereal makeup and hair extensions might have been the look to strive for during seasons past. The sudden omnipresence of the look—elegant and classic—is a drastic reinvention of what we define as sexy. It is as if we, as a culture, have come out of our rebellious teenage stage. We have idolized stars that certainly bared more than their mid-riffs, and then had to suffer through photos of our former pop princess treading gas station floors bare-footed and pregnant, with her doo-rag-donning now-ex-hubby in tow. That punishment alone was likely enough to prompt us to seek out a different kind of cultural figure to place on our collective pedestal. As virtually all of our beloved Hollywood couples crumble (frequently amid allegations of infidelity or drug abuse) is it possible we’re just in desperate need of at least a handful of celebs whose style we can aspire to, and whose image isn’t clouded by seedy personal tidbits that obscure their allure? After all, how can you want the look of the girl on the cover of the magazine, when pictures of the same girl are all over the tabloids, looking the part of anything but a style icon? I’m not saying we have the right to expect anything from our celebrities’ private lives. But isn’t it normal to want to see someone, among all the images of women that dominate our media, who is beautiful, stylish—and also exudes a touch of class? Tom Ford once said that when we go out in public, we “inflict” ourselves on others. While at first I found his choice of words amusing, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I agree. I can’t say I’ve never been guilty myself of making a quick trip to the grocery store or going on a takeout-sushi run in sweats and barely combed hair. These forays usually result in instant karma, when I inevitably run into an old friend, or perhaps a business associate, and I’m haunted by the impression they must have of me after seeing me in all my poofy-eyed, flip-flopped glory. It’s as much about what they’ll think as about how I feel during the entire exchange. It always kills me to think that it would’ve taken just ten minutes to put on jeans and a top and comb my hair. All of these reasons are why to me, Old Hollywood Glamour is, more than a trend, a symbol of yearning. We want to live in a time where sexiness does not necessarily imply nudity, and an emphasis on class is not regarded as a dowdy relic from our mother’s time. We want to live in a time when, as much as we don’t want to be defined by what we look like, we can also reserve the prerogative for elegance. |
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