Michael Rübsamen

It is not too far fetched to claim that celebrity is a
phenomenon that is difficult to define. It is hard to
maintain rigid hierarchies between the components
that make up celebrity. One of them can be described
as glamour.
In the paper I examine ways to understand glamour
as an intrinsic part of the symbolic construction of
celebrity. It has been used as a inherent quality in
the person (Gould, 2005) or as an institutionalised
esthetic practice (Willis-Tropea, 2011). Also,
glamour is often connected to the luxurious and
desireable styles of life celebrities lead. The public
display of consumption that glamour relies upon
is an important feature, perhaps even the most
important feature, of modern celebrity. According to
Gundle (2002), glamour’s
possibly most distinctive feature is that it, instead
of creating jealousy, inspires to desire. Glamour is
something that is available and within the reach of
everyone. The glamour in the celebrity industry plays
upon the public’s desire to become a celebrity or to
be able to achieve the same lifestyle. In her doctoral
thesis, Nanna Gillberg called celebrities “parking
lots of human desire”. Glamour is a tincture of sex
appeal, luxury, elegance and romance. Glamour
plays upon desire by appealing to notions of
distinction and availability.The refined and distanced
persona of the glamourous person could easily be
distinguished as a premier feature of the glamorous
persona.
The paper analyses and discusses two main swedish
contemporary celebrities by employing a analysis
inspired of Simmel with focus on consumption,
fashion, blasé attitude and distance. The paper
investigates aspects of glamour as they show
themselves in practice in the portrayal of the two
celebrities. In the analysis I investigate the building
of glamour and show how maintainance of distance
and blasé attitude are necessary components in the
construction of the celebrity and while glamour
may be something that is created with relative ease
in pictures, it is much more difficult to sustain it in
real life. The paper is a part of Michael Rübsamen’s
doctoral thesis, on the mediated construction of
celebrity in Sweden.