Virginia Postrel in Works in Progress:
Progress used to be glamorous. For the first two thirds of the twentieth-century, the terms modern, future, and world of tomorrow shimmered with promise. Glamour is more than a synonym for fashion or celebrity, although these things can certainly be glamorous. So can a holiday resort, a city, or a career. The military can be glamorous, as can technology, science, or the religious life. It all depends on the audience. Glamour is a form of communication that, like humor, we recognize by its characteristic effect. Something is glamorous when it inspires a sense of projection and longing: if only . . .
Whatever its incarnation, glamour offers a promise of escape and transformation. It focuses deep, often unarticulated longings on an image or idea that makes them feel attainable. Both the longings – for wealth, happiness, security, comfort, recognition, adventure, love, tranquility, freedom, or respect – and the objects that represent them vary from person to person, culture to culture, era to era. In the twentieth-century, ‘the future’ was a glamorous concept.
Joan Kron, a journalist and filmmaker born in 1928, recalls sitting on the floor as a little girl, cutting out pictures of ever more streamlined cars from newspaper ads. ‘I was fascinated with car design, these modern cars’, she says. ‘Industrial design was very much on our minds. It wasn’t just to look at. It was bringing us the future.’ Young Joan lived a short train ride from the famous 1939 New York World’s Fair, whose theme was The World of Tomorrow. She went again and again, never missing the Futurama exhibit. There, visitors zoomed across the imagined landscape of America in 1960, with smoothly flowing divided highways, skyscraper cities, high-tech farms, and charming suburbs. ‘This 1960 drama of highway and transportation progress’, the announcer proclaimed, ‘is but a symbol of future progress in every activity made possible by constant striving toward new and better horizons.’
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