The Beauty Of Illusion

Is our infatuation with glamour superficial, or subversive? We look to modern art — of all the unlikely places — for answers.

- Ryan Sng

The avant-garde movements of the late 1800s and early 1900s have more in common with the art of glamour than one would assume at first glance. As a word, “glamour” conjures a dream-like, heightened reality where nothing is exactly as it seems; in fact, Carol Dyhouse notes in Glamour: Women, History, Feminism that when it first appeared in the late 19th century, glamour was linked to trickery and the occult, a magical and slightly sinister force. Like the Surrealists who practised automatism to bridge the gap between the mysterious subconscious and the physical world, glamour has historically provided women an outlet to live out their fantasies.

Just as a painting of a pipe was never just a gag, but an interrogation of reality and our complacent relationship with images, young women at the turn of the century defiantly wearing red lipstick – historically linked with prostitution – was more than a question of vanity or an assault on public decency. It manifested a pathway to a more independent and assertive form of womanhood by posing a challenge to stifling notions of propriety and conformance.

It is a subversion that is little appreciated today, in a world inured to the shock once caused by melting clocks and lobsters, and where eye-wateringly bright lipstick and unicorn hair are practically banal.

Reactions toward the unsettling nature of avantgarde masterpieces have often been as polarised as those toward exaggerated presentations of feminine beauty, such as drag. Are they playfully anarchic, or are they degenerate and hazardous to the moral fabric of civilisation?