essay
by ANFISA VRUBEL
Glamour is the language through which a culture dreams in public. It stages beauty where none is required, insisting on radiance and excess amid cultural saturation and fatigue to affirm that imagination can still take unexpected forms. Far from being a tool of escapism or denial, glamour orients us within specific moments of cultural tension. Time and time again, during periods of instability and decline, societies have retreated into curated surfaces and decadence, constructing identity through self-narration, media, and imagery. In its cultural sense, decadence does not simply mean decline but a heightened self-consciousness at the end of a cycle, when refinement veers into excess and aestheticism becomes a symptom of exhaustion.
The modern form of glamour begins in retreat. In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (Against Nature) — written during the twilight of France’s Second Empire and the tumultuous transformations of the early Third Republic —…