“Whether Witches Can by Some Glamour Change Men into Beasts”: Wit and the Seductive Glamour of Fashion

Abstract

Glamour is usually theorized within fashion studies as a visual illusion, distant and unattainable, often associated with celebrity elites. Yet glamour also possesses a power of attraction and fascination that could also be described as a form of seduction. How might an idea of seduction inform our understanding of the glamour of fashion? Using an empirical example of a camouflage couture dress by Jean-Paul Gaultier as a point of departure, I will explicate an unusual and interdisciplinary historical text — the notorious witch-hunting bible, the Malleus Maleficarum—to elaborate a theory of glamour as systemic, powerful, and immersive. Furthermore, this theory of glamour is predicated on a seductive form of wit. I will draw on Jean Baudrillard’s Seduction, which itself connects seduction and wit to the glamour of fashion, to argue that it is precisely a concept of wit that might allow us to conceptualize the glamour of fashion not as an unattainable illusion, but as an immersive, powerful and effective phenomenon. This revised definition of glamour possesses important implications for how we might think fashion itself.