IT MADE Siren’s day when a new book with the simple but irresistible title Glamour winged its way in to our pigeonhole.
Written by Professor Stephen Gundle, a media expert based at Warwick University, this satisfying tome explores the history of glamour in terms of sex appeal, fame and money and those who embodied it – and it manages to include everyone from the 18th
-century Parisian courtesans to Marlene Dietrich to Paris Hilton.
But if your interest in the topic runs a little deeper than attention-seeking Hollywood heiresses, you may be interested to read therein that the word “glamour” itself is of Scottish derivation. It is, says Gundle, an Anglicisation of “glamer”, used since the early 1700s and defined as “the supposed influence of a charm on the eye, causing it to see objects differently from what they really are”. Walter Scott first used the word in his acclaimed prose poem, The Lay of The Last Minstrel, in 1805.
Glamour (£20, from Oxford University Press) has enough juicy celebrity anecdotes to keep you gripped during your week’s sunbathing in Sardinia this summer, but will leave you far better informed than any Heat photo-feature about stars and their bikini cellulite disasters.
Making a packetSADLY, Victoria Beckham may never become the style dictator she aspires to be (certainly not with those ghastly wigwam-legged DVB jeans), but her husband has only to remove his jeans to cause a fashion frenzy. John Lewis has reported that sales of men’s brief-style underpants shot up by 42 per cent immediately following the launch of David Beckham’s advertising campaign for Armani underwear.
The Armani range itself was introduced to the store just this season, but is now John Lewis’ second biggest-selling underwear label.
Is it men who are buying them for themselves, though, or wives and girlfriends desperate to see off those “comedy” Bart Simpson boxer shorts and sagging grey Y-fronts once and for all and turn their other half into something more resembling a beefcake of Beckhamesque proportions?
Father knows best?HOLLYWOOD actress Liv Tyler recently revealed to a reporter that her dewy complexion is not only a genetic legacy from her mother Bebe Buell, a former model, but also a result of the beauty tips she gets from her dad, rubber-lipped Aerosmith frontman Steve Tyler. “I have slumber parties with my father,” trills the star, “we trade beauty secrets. He knows all the good creams and masks.”
Liv, darling, your 60-year-old Pa may look way younger than his years, but rumours suggest that may be down to Botox and/or cosmetic surgery, rather than a recent discovery of the joys of pentapeptides. It surely takes more than the odd night in with Estée Lauder to undo the damage wrought by three decades of rock’n’roll lifestyle?
Fuzzy phone receptionWELL-known shrinking violet Nancy Dell’Olio has put her inimitable stamp on a new mobile phone that is being auctioned on eBay to raise money for the Red Cross. Swedish electronics firm Doro asked Sven Goran Eriksson’s on-off lady-love to customise its NeoBio phone, above, and the result is this tasteful little number, which the Italian SuperWag describes as a “Rio Carnival style”.
Siren thinks it looks like something that’s been jammed under Shrek’s armpit for several days, but Nancy, we applaud your ongoing commitment to the Red Cross and hope one of your adoring fans puts in a chunky bid for this, er, tasteful little fluffbox. To bid, visit her eBay page via
http://tinyurl.com/6ypj72 before 6am on 10 July.
Expressing intoleranceA NEW UK survey of 3,500 breastfeeding mothers reveals that 54 per cent have received “unwanted attention” while feeding their child in public. Some 20 per cent said that they had let their baby cry rather than breastfeed publicly, while more than 30 per cent had used a bottle when out and about.
But would you ever resort to using the Mamaflage? Described as a “lightweight poncho that simply slips over your head and keeps you covered up while you feed your baby”, it looks to Siren more like a breastfeeding burka.
Yes, our society still has a long way to go in its attitude to the exposed breast.
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www.liefde.co.uk)
The full article contains 731 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
