The Birth of Hollywood Glamour

Abstract

The power of both fashion and film to engage illusion and reality simultaneously is implicated in the evolution of Hollywood as a manufacturer of dreams. Lucile eloquently summarized the sheer power of film and fashion in creating the desire for beautiful clothes, or her “dream dresses,” as she often called them. She wrote in her autobiography that “All women make pictures for themselves … they watch Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo acting for them at the cinema, but it is themselves they are watching really.” She continued, likening the act of going to the movies to a fashion show:

and when the lights are lowered to a rosy glow and soft music is played and the mannequins parade, there is not a woman in the audience, though she may be fat and middle-aged, who is not seeing herself looking at those slim beautiful girls in the clothes they are offering her. And that is the inevitable prelude to buying the clothes.¹