Glamour razzles and dazzles.
Turns heads. Fuels red carpets. Inspires love and envy. This week the HQ of glam blazed through a billion media outlets.
The 98th Oscars conjured up the usual shiny suspects in all their bejewelled finery. But is it all benign – I mean, really? Well. The clue is in the conjuring.
Ever since I read Maggie Hamilton’s deceptively sweet book, Inside the Secret World of Fairies, my view of ‘glamour’ has had a makeover because its etymology is a little sinister.
Originally from the Scottish word for grammar, glamour’s sole purpose was to beguile ‘the victim’ into seeing something other than the reality.
Hm. Victims, fans, red carpet reporters. You say tomato, I say Tom Ford.
Walter Scott summed it up in his charming medieval verse, The Lay of the Last Minstrel circa 1805:
“It had much of glamour might;
Could make a ladye seem a knight;
The cobwebs on a dungeon wall
Seem tapestry in lordly hall;
And youth seem age, and age seem youth:
All was delusion, nought was truth.”
But. For one brief, genuinely shining moment, the Oscars honoured Jessie Buckley when she won Best Actress for her role in Hamnet.
She took to the stage, a slender row of diamonds at her neck, Chanel around her shoulders – accoutrements that paled in comparison when she dedicated her new little gold friend to “…the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.”
And as mamas the world over will gladly tell you, there’s no glamour in that.
© Phyllis Foundis 2026