Death and Glamour

The happiness of being envied is glamour. The magic of glamour is performed with images at scale by ads, celebrities, and rich people on Instagram. Glamour is supposed to make you ill; once you become ill you have three outcomes 1): live with the illness. 2): buy something in the attempt to perform your own glamour; 3): follow the pathology into body dysmorphia and death. Glamour, as we can see on the blank faces in these ads—Dolce and Gabbana, Balenciaga, Louise Vuitton—prefers that you die. The spell of glamour can only function if there is a recipient who is envious to the point of self-destruction. Envy is an acute death-wish induced in us by enchanted images of beautiful well-dressed rich persons in attitudes of extreme hauteur, typically in remote and inaccessible locations; their happiness cannot be shared, only dreamed of. This happiness is sadistic because it is contingent upon your envy and illness. The envy is weaponized and made insidious by certain parents who project onto their child an envied and idealized body: the child feels they must become this body or die. These curses find what is vulnerable in us and exploit it; that teenage girls commit suicide as a result only makes the spell more real; glamour needs hot blood.