notes on glamour

A Dionysian era ascends, marked by spiritual gluttony, pacified only through the consumption of pleasures. Our conveniences atomize and alienate, enmeshing neurotic, prudish paranoias that seek to manage the risks of all things dangerous and libidinous. What notion of allure can endure in a culture that seeks endlessly to mitigate the frictions and frissons that give our lives texture?

To describe allure is to destroy it; to invoke its name is to render it obsolete. The new glamour is no longer expansive or worldly. It’s minute, austere, and introspective: a silent exercise in curation, sense-making, and self-denial, transcending the spiritual overabundance of modernity.

The true glamoureuse makes no attempt to sanitize the animalistic facets of human desire, recognizing that sex and violence are inextricably linked — that glamour thrives only under the tension of transgression and temperance.

— Elena Velez