Virginia Postrel: Glamour and Yearning

This then is what glamour does as rhetoric. It focuses preexisting, largely unarticulated desires on a specific object, intensifying longing. It thus allows us to imaginatively inhabit the ideal and, as a result, to believe–at least for a moment–that we can achieve it in real life. … Glamour is defined not by the specific desires it promotes but by the process of projection and sense of yearning it creates and … by the recurring elements that generate that projection and yearning: the promise of escape and transformation; grace; and mystery.

– Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour, p. 41