Amid the rumors that the city is dead, New York has remained a global fashion capital as well as a site for beauty trends and consumption. The visual delights of the metropolis have inspired and continue to inspire those who study the city and capitalism, funky formalists and artists, as well as the fashion designer who adopts the city as a backdrop for her collections of “tough chic.” The term glamour itself is not just a label for a fashionable lifestyle; it is also an analytic that can help us to understand and appreciate the meaning of central preoccupations in American culture and urban life. Fashion’s temporal movement between the passé and the future, speeding up and slowing down in various historical moments, often captures the spirit of the city. While fashion is influenced by national socio-economic conditions and the fashion media of the times, the city offers a distinct sensibility that informs and inspires the avant-gardes in style and design. It is not that New York actually contains a certain look, but rather that the sheer clash and movement of old and new, broken bumpers and all, combine to suggest purified essences, flashes of untouchable glamour in the plural: filmed with high contrast color and focused with selective makeup, fashion photographers and directors fix this precarious, glowing sensibility to enthrall us visually with an urgency. I want to explore this glamorous visuality of the city and its fashion scene. I am not interested in pinning down who or what is glamorous, nor am I interested in the ins and outs of the phenomenon of “glamour” as a vogue. Rather, I want to explore the meanings suggested by the visual markers of the glamorous aesthetic as it moves through the city’s past fashion scenes and serves as inspiration for the New York visual montage we have in the 1990s. I would argue that the theory of glamour as crystalline fluidity exemplified by fascination with the modern, the new, and the glittering waif, is seductive and plausible to the extent that it accounts for the image of the city circulating internationally in fashion spreads, art photography, news magazines, and films. The language of glamour is this visuality: it is here that the times lift up her skirt and we see her secret, seductive, glamorous hope. Our focus is on the city’s visual montage, and our purpose is to explore the enigmatic allure of New York over the past twenty-five years.
Defining Glamour in the City
Glamour in the City: A Visual Journey Through New York’s Beauty and Fashion Scene’
Defining Glamour in the City
Glamour has long been a buzzword in New York’s fashion and beauty communities, but what does it really mean? While by no means a dictionary definition, glamour as explored in these pages is a concept that extends far beyond the latest runway trends or the purchase of luxury goods. It is as random and fleeting as it is permanent and statuesque. Glamour can manifest in beauty, certainly, in fashion, in art, in design, and architecture; it’s also a state of mind, a philosophy, a way of seeing and being seen. It can be ‘a sort of bloom on a woman’ or ‘a woman with a cool appraising gaze.’ Glamour can evoke personal sentiments and global moods and can equally be seen as whimsical escapism or deadly and dangerous artifice.
The subjects of glamour must be ‘evanescent, so transitory, in a word, so unreal,’ to achieve maximum allure. ‘But it remains locked in historical time and place.’ Indeed, glamour can interpret place as well as objects; understanding glamour to be a force shaping cities according to an upper-class interpretation of beauty and authority. Much like charismatic individuals, each city and neighborhood embodies its own glamorous qualities, and expectations of school students or fashion show audiences can be built or dashed in cinematic portrayals of New York and Paris. Yet just as glamour has flooded our souring reality TV and Instagram-saturated world, the definition of glamour has become more democratized and expanded in recent years. Glamour is now not exclusively the purview of the elite. Glamour can be individual and personal, a street that is known by its scent and another that owns a skyline. Glamour is the ordinary movie playing out on the street. Glamour is the wave of the future.
Historical Evolution of New York’s Beauty and Fashion Scene
New York City fashion and beauty scene didn’t materialize out of nothing. It has deep roots that have grown and evolved to create the beautiful mosaic that is New York fashion. From the waves of immigration that reshaped the face of the city every decade to the success stories that have made the Big Apple synonymous with style and substance, New York fashion is an adventure-filled love story with multicultural foundations and glamorous modern-day contours. This is a brief historical overview to provide some context of where New York fits on today’s world fashion stage.
Fashion historians usually cite the Parsons School of Design, founded in 1896, as the birthplace of fashion as an art in America. In the 1920s, Chanel and Poiret and the freedom movement they represented revolutionized European couture and, consequently, fashion. Women were wearing corsets. The roaring twenties was to become the zenith of European dominance in American fashion. But Wall Street led to rock bottom in the thirties, and German and French couture suffered most losses with few survivors. During the decade, designer shops on 5th Avenue were invaded by middle-class women. Makeup was a pick-me-up. Hairdos, as usual, were liberating, as were the artificial permanent waves. Scent? Chanel No. 5.
Early Influences and Icons
At the turn of the 20th century, the beautiful venue of the St. Regis Hotel housed many of the upper crust who poured into New York sporting en vogue styles of the Gilded Age. Together, these elite members of the American upper classes included leading families of society, art, and fashion. The characters of two major patrons of fashion and beauty in a unique movement of art, enterprise, and social ambition of their time – and certainly New York today. Laboring together in their shared passion for high fashion and beauty, Harrison and Rains bathe in the glisten of luxury, the vivid warm pastels of painting across the walls and leotards at the ballet in 1910, the scents, styles, and music of Paris at new department stores in New York, and the glamorous showcases featuring fashion upon grand staircases at luxury emporia for years.
It is through name-brand stores and the local tailors, modistes, and taste setters that New York was setting its own pace and emergent international appeal. This happened because the city was home to so many thousands of new and breakthrough artists and craftsmen, all striking out on their own sources of inspiration, from the Arts and Crafts movement to the concurrent School. The beautiful homes and wardrobe of “swank New York” filled the Washington Square Studio and attracted national attention, creating the city’s status as a fashion and art world east coast rival to the grand palaces and modes in the new world cities. Fashioned and fashion-focused immigrants imported and hybridized styles to stunning success. For all their hard work, ads for their products described glamour as a unique, almost accidental luxury and style, as personal to them as it is to any beauty. Ads teasing, “Wear underwear, is it the magic thing every sophisticated woman knows?” flaunt the style of “the fashionable girl, who knows as much about the delicate arts of dress as she does about the art of making money!”
Key Elements of New York’s Glamour
New York has a long legacy as a fashion capital. For about 200 years, the Garment District has been the center of fashion design and production in the United States. When the high-end businesses began to move into the district, the streets were filled with fashion models, designers, stylists, and celebrities. However, large lofts and happy families accompany middle-of-the-road designer boutiques. The blend of quality, style, and fashionable activities overflows in SoHo, an area known as the largest cast iron historic district in the world. SoHo retains the look of early 19th century Manhattan, with large stubby iron arches forming open, street-level architecture-of-display spaces that give SoHo an old-world and yet, surprisingly modern look. SoHo is New York’s best-preserved example of the Italianate building and the place from which New York has developed the style of classic French design.
SoHo’s architecture is intrinsically part of SoHo’s glamorous image. An incredibly photogenic mix of architecturally odd old tenement buildings and trendy, young fashion stores, the area has been featured on countless occasions in provocative fashion spreads. New York is the sexiest city on earth, and its architecture and street life are part of what makes New York the hippest city in the world. New York City is distinguished by the energy fueled by its many districts, but in the fashion districts, style is the yardstick of the culture. A fast-paced consumer culture, which quickly embraces and tosses aside clothing of past style seasons, has pushed fashion designers to create new trendsetting designs constantly. Fashion houses are actually starting to even hire top-billing film directors and music video producers to lead in their promotional campaigns. They sell garb, but more importantly, they sell the idea that their designs are cool. Fashion Week is seen as a party for fashion insiders, but it also serves a purpose as it becomes the basis from which department stores stock their shelves. Fashion Week previews guarantee that readers of fashion magazines will be getting into new trends squarely from their Manhattan motels and homes. This New York style feed spills over to large and small cities and is gobbled up by fashion retailers competing in the global fashion industry.
Fashion Districts and Landmarks
In just one avenue are more individual businesses and brands than the whole of many small towns and villages. Though no longer the wilds of pickpockets, brawls, or the marked and secret privileges of footmen, these select neighborhoods remain the Gotham of gossip and rumor, where shoppers of every stratum, and tourists and pilgrims from around the world, come as inveterately as worshipers to a shrine. Items from these neighborhoods zing ceaselessly around the world in the columns, chat rooms, and photo sites. Their fashions, products, and permutations cross back and forth through books, film, and television.
City life is a constant series of obsolescences and regenerations. ‘Fashionable’ neighborhoods are no exception. In the later 19th century, what had been roughly the six city blocks that made up the ‘Ladies Mile’ moved uptown to the Fifth Avenue region. In 1924, Ladies Mile moved again, relocating to the mansions-turned-shops along and off 57th Street. This also revised the borders of the ‘Millionaires’ Mile’ considerably. Ladies Mile’s garment district today is along Seventh Avenue, generally between 34th and 40th St. Now and then the Trade Center gets in the way. In the changing cityscape of upscale shopping, one thing is constant: grand landmarks. These original locations still retain their magic a century and more after opening, drawing us back as to a pilgrimage.
Influential Figures in New York’s Beauty and Fashion Industry
Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, has been called the most fashionable New Yorker. She is one of those people who let outsiders dream of the petite circle of the chosen few who strut down Fifth Avenue and the celebrity-filled red carpets. Indeed, a select few influence and reflect the beauty and fashion industry of New York City through their distinctive style and images—and by doing so reflect the glamour found here. When people think of New York’s beauty scene, a lot of their knowledge is based on New York fashion.
One of the most important groups that explicitly stand for New York fashion is innovative and boundary-pushing designers. These designers showcase their work at annual fashion weeks in the city. So many designers have had an impact on the beauty and fashion industry. Some do so by differentiating their products from others by mostly indicating fashion as able to be purchased by anyone, not just the very wealthy. Yet, someone—either significantly or otherwise—contributes to the beauty and fashion industry of New York City. It seems clear that it is not only wearers of clothing that are flamboyant, but creators as well. Models are another really important part of fashion because they actually wear the clothing. They are also trendsetters and global ambassadors for fashion. Many famous models live in New York. However, some public officials are even more important than others in relation to fashion. Public servants may serve as live models, where photos are printed in beauty and fashion magazines, commercials, and other public promotions. While the idea of beauty is universal, these publics may have made a significant change in how one person perceives the standards of beauty. It is also likely that public reaction to big public events will have these individuals as contestants. However, the extent of this pool of people seems to be even broader. Some people are famous not by their appearances in beauty or fashion magazines, but because they can influence other people. This select group uses social media to show others how to look, think, or act in a futuristic way.
Designers, Models, and Influencers
The fashion scene is supported by the greatly talented designers who come here to work and build their businesses. On this stretch of Madison Avenue, rent prices are often in the six figures. You can only afford it if serious money is coming in. Many big names have shops in the neighborhood. There are about 800 fashion designers showing during Fashion Week, and only 23 are worth more than $1 billion. To join the ranks of fashion wealth, you must have the right talent and some luck too. Most designers work their way up to making the big money, but everyone starts at the bottom. Before they were internationally known designers, one was an editor, another sewed samples, and yet another designed a bathing suit collection.
Models from New York City have been the face of the fashion industry since one walked onto the scene. Most models don’t reach her level, but they share a beautiful combination of signs and good fortune. The beauty of the models walking the catwalks gives New York fashion shows inspiration. Showrooms and shops that sell designer clothes have turned over photographs of young models to hundreds of people with different looks. A new group of New York VIPs is the city’s community of influencers, whose names—like the models who came before them—are synonymous in one way or another with fashion. Fashion week invitations? They don’t need them to be in vogue. The backlash the community has received is due to the failure to accept that the world we live in has beauty in many forms, and not only in the traditional icons.
Visual Representation of Glamour in New York
Seeing is believing. That is such a visually satisfying statement, isn’t it? It succinctly demonstrates a fundamental life rule; we can almost allow it to govern a part of our existence. Granted, when one examines the power of visual media and how images of glamour and beauty can skew reality, a sort of reverse understanding ensues. There may exist a difference between what one sees – the representation of beauty and fashion – and what one experiences – a complex, lived urban environment that sees both decay and luxury. Some also blur the line between photographic truth and available fantasies of glamour due to their artistic techniques or treatments. Moreover, artists have been capturing images that titillate an audience with an urban gaze turned toward the pretty things that city life has to offer. From the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, works like theirs were and are representative of a public fascination with fashion. In the 1920s and 30s, the image of the female elegantly strolling down the avenue was a personality separate from the woman maybe sitting at home.
Today, photography and digital media have the power to affect what people are supposed to look like. Consider: In the not-so-long-ago era of the 20th century, it was the “industry” of fashion, represented by a few prestigious glossy magazines, that set the public standard for appearance. Sacred publications began to appear in the post-World War II era, promoting the image of the greatest of all possible glamorous lives. Glamour was what women wanted. Glamour made success in the fashion and media industries. Glamour then took its show on the road and brought a whole new standard of the fabulous to posterity and foreign lands. The popular image-makers of the 20th century created what society thought beauty could be: desired, coveted, and even required. Glamour, and beauty for that matter, are the configurations of a visual story that we understand more easily than the reverse. People will modify their lives to accommodate their visual realities. Glamour, therefore, can be viewed as the aesthetic form – we know it in part by what it shows us. A visual narrative is habit-forming that way. Glamour is at the place where looking and longing touch.
Photography and Media
Photography has the unique ability to document, fictionalize, fetishize, and frame what we see. Since its introduction, with the beginnings of modern fashion photography in the legendary studios of Paris’s haute couture ateliers in the 1910s, it has shown the clothes of Azzedine Alaïa, a Dior-clad Grace Kelly, Giorgio Armani’s softly constructed suits, and austere campaign images which each in their separate times captured elements of glamour and brought them to their audience. The creation of rank and file modern fashion photography has ensured a wide audience for glamour’s latest style. Charles Frederick Worth is credited with originating the fashion show, but one could argue that it is in fact fashion photography that has done much of the heaviest lifting to popularize glamour’s visual form and definition to date.
There have been countless photographers who have made fashion photographs into art since the medium first began to appear in fashion media in the early 20th century, but it is now impossible to imagine fashion, style, and glamour in New York without considering the photographs of Bill Cunningham, Richard Avedon, James Nordberg, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Annie Leibovitz. The impact of their work on both representation and fashion cannot be underestimated. The images they created and popularized at first through magazines, and later through large advertising images displayed on department stores, both illustrated the glamour of New York and propped it up, providing evidence of a delicate parasitism that is the functional link between the two. Today, the line between fashion and the popular representation of fashion has become indistinct, online and in print, where various websites all carry copies of similar photographs of fashion shots from major shows.
