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The third theme of behavioral finance is inefficient markets. In recent years scholars have produced considerable evidence that heuristic‐driven bias and frame dependence cause markets to be inefficient. Scholars use the term “anomalies” to describe specific market inefficiencies. For this reason, Eugene Fama characterizes behavioral finance as “anomalies dredging.” This chapter discusses what behavioral finance implies about picking stocks and beating the market. Market efficiency is a direct challenge to active money managers, because it implies that trying to beat the market is a waste of time. Why? Because no security is mispriced in an efficient market, at least relative to information that is publicly available. Inside information may be another story. The chapter discusses whether the stock recommendations made by brokerage houses have beaten the market, and a series of effects discussed in the literature: the winner–loser effect, momentum, the size effect, the book‐to‐market effect, the effect of a change in analysts' recommendations.

This chapter explores the coverage of public figures. Celebrities — especially royalty and cinema stars — were hugely influential in giving definition to notions of glamour and sex appeal. Press reporting also helped to set the boundaries between what was deemed ‘public’ and ‘private’. Ideas about what sort of ‘private’ material was suitable for public consumption changed considerably. In the first half of the century, the sexual proclivities of prominent individuals were treated with considerable circumspection. By the 1950s, however, a market was developing for confessional features in which celebrities would discuss their sexual exploits. The extensive speculation about Princess Margaret's relationship with Peter Townsend provided a stark contrast with the press silence surrounding Edward VIII's relationship with Wallis Simpson. The Profumo scandal in 1963 demonstrated the spectacular stories that could be produced by more aggressive investigation. Despite calls for privacy legislation, governments were reluctant to challenge the ‘freedom of the press’.

This chapter discusses the Blessed Lord's benefactors, believers, enemies, and critics. The chapter begins narratives of some of the people who were benefactors of Buddha. Among these benefactors were the King Bimbisara, Ambrapali and Vishakha; all of whom offered gifts and assistance. The next section discusses the enemies of Buddhism. These enemies charged Buddhism of conversion by glamour, of being parasites that dwelled on the earnings and sweat of other people, of breaking happy households by attracting young people to exile and Parivraja, and of immorality and murder. Among the staunchest enemies of Buddha were Devadatta and the Brahmins. The chapter also covers the critiques hurled against Buddhism and its doctrines. Some of the Buddhist doctrines criticised were: open admission to the Sangha, rule of vows; doctrine of ahimsa; and theory of soul and rebirth. Buddhism was also condemned of being annihilationist and of creating gloom through the vow of poverty.

While the general public engages in varying levels of it, the models and modeling professionals I spoke to for this study claimed they felt as though they were never off duty and were always at work to produce the right “look” in person, in photographs, and online. Model agents made it clear that it matters where models live, where they eat and shop, and on which airline they travel. As this chapter explores, some respondents reported being told explicitly by their agents they had to put on the show all the time, even if they were just running around the corner to do an errand, mindful of the impression they might make as they are out and about, conscious of their online image created by the photos snapped of them in fashionable neighborhoods or at social events and posted to blogs or websites dedicated to documenting the modeling world. It seems like a lot of work, but models who really want to “make it” report trying to make it look fun to be exposed in this way, to be “on” all the time, to be out there in the spotlight, as often as humanly possible.

This chapter determines how the industrial manufacture of intimate apparel has shaped the definition of undergarments in American culture. The cultural activities of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and the fashion sensibilities of garment workers were found between fashion production and consumption. It looks at the dressing practices of undergarment workers and their steady participation in union activities. This reveals that the division between the fashion industry and the garment industry results from ideologies and cultural institutions that build social distinctions between the people who sew and the people who shop. The chapter concludes that glamour, particularly as expressed in fashion, has been a powerful mediator of tensions and upholding inequity in modern America.

Commenting on the celebrity his 1924 hit The Vortex afforded him, Noël Coward noted that he “was seldom mentioned in the press without allusions to ‘cocktails,’ ‘post-war hysteria,’ and ‘decadence.’” This chapter investigates the potent mixture of thematic and stylistic ingredients that render the onstage cocktail the signature of Coward’s brand of popular modernism. It does so by situating his refined drinkers within the popular culture of the interwar period, when drinking cocktails connoted a fashionable rejection of outmoded Victorianism. Staged in in some of British modernism’s defining spaces, cocktails in Coward’s plays are bibulous supplements to the witty dialogue he described as “small talk, a lot of small talk, with other thoughts going on behind.” To sip a cocktail in a Coward play is thus to enact a self that is up to date, metropolitan, sophisticated – a concoction of ingredients whose flavour is indelibly modern.

In this chapter, I explore the significance of increasingly stringent and exigent dieting, exercise, and surgery advice from the 1970s onward, highlighting how self-altering practices were cast as a means to become an acceptable member of society. It explores how the model became the ideal for the whole population. Simultaneously, however, the body’s vitality and mutability also came to be favored, as a biopolitics of beauty emerged, organizing and regulating publics at the level of population, as a standing reserve, always already in need of enhancement and optimization, ready for a close-up, in need of that makeover. In tandem with these developments, modeling work took on characteristics that prompted some of my respondents to refer to it as “the life,” a state of working that felt to many like having to be “on” all the time. In the transition from day job to total lifestyle, playing the role of being a model—sashaying about in crinolines, carrying a hatbox containing waist cinchers and war paints (the badge of the model’s trade), while ducking into movie theaters to make oneself scarce between calls—gave way to the casual street chic, “I only dress up on the runway” attitude of today, where models live the part, hiding the effort required to make looking glamourous seem easy and like something everyone should do.

Chapter 3 continues the focus on WLS’s 1930s radio stars and their treatment of gender by examining the musical and cultural significance of Patsy Montana’s singing cowgirl persona. Like Lulu Belle, Montana included a fluid mix of musical styles and vaudevillian practices. But instead of offering parodies of southern culture, Montana’s gender-bending songs took place in the imaginary West. In her musical depictions of tomboy cowgirls and glamorous western heroines, Montana combined virtuosic yodeling with what her listeners described as a “sweet” singing style. As such, she refashioned the West into a place where standard models of gender could include autonomous cowgirls who yodeled to the heights of their vocal range while singing sweetly about the symbolic freedoms associated with frontier individualism.

With a mixture of talent, naiveté, and marketing smarts, Anne Sexton created lasting images of glamour, genius, insouciance, and self-destruction that defined the late-twentieth century woman, poet, and woman-poet. These images contributed to her success, but also made it difficult to assess her poetry, as shown by contemporary reviews of her work. “Are We Fake? Images of Anne Sexton, Twentieth-Century Woman/Poet” looks at how the images evolved and what pleasure and enlightenment we can gain from them now.

This chapter details the sprawling transnational commodity chain that helps transform lowly rocks into valuable gems. It traces the historical importance of diamonds, noting how Greek, Indian, and Chinese legends all allude to diamonds' magical qualities, describing their use as poisoning or healing agents, or as cutting and bead-drilling tools. Through a kind of contagious magic, diamonds were also thought to bring virility to men on the battlefield and in the bedroom. However, the association of diamonds with romance, status, and glamour is, actually, relatively recent as it was only in the mid-fifteenth-century in France where this admiration started. The chapter also describes the history of diamond mining, outlining the early major “diamond rushes” that happened in Africa, India, and Brazil and the rise of the De Beers company, a global leader in diamond exploration, mining, and trading.

This chapter explores the emergence and long career of British sex symbol Diana Dors, with a particular emphasis on the height of her film career in the 1950s (and her temporary relocation to Hollywood) but also examines her ongoing self-fashioning as a celebrity in the decades beyond her moment as a pin-up.

I describe in this chapter how the increased effort to harness hard-to-manage forms of “affective” energy accelerated the demand for models to sell brands and how eventually, in the form of the supermodels, models became brands themselves. The inauguration of the supermodels brought the transition from a girl who models to the 24/7 supermodel icon and the supermodels who became the quintessential glamour laborers who were never off duty. Facilitated by newly far flung webs of cable television and high-speed communications, the supermodels became household names. This transition laid the groundwork for the rise of mass fashion and the spread of glamour labor to the general populace. Prior to the regime of the blink, the fashion show, for instance, was nothing like the branded dazzle with which we are currently familiar.

In this chapter, I treat how changes in the goals and methods of the fashion shoot. The value of what the model did changed from the 1900s discovery that a person’s image could be owned by them and worth money to the carefully staged and scripted studio shots prevalent from the 1920s through the 1950s, to the far more intense and invasive practice of getting one’s “soul sucked out” by the camera lens, as one model described it, to being given the puzzling direction to try to look like a rat (as the former supermodel Cindy Crawford reported). This chapter tracks shifts in photographic modeling, from using models as mere props to an intense experience in which the model is expected to reveal herself utterly to the camera. Models’ stories about photographic sittings and shoots reveal how affective lability or mania became a valuable factor in modeling work for the camera in the age of the blink.

In this chapter, I document how advertising’s need to send a specific, meaningful message to an interested consumer shaped the work of model management in its early days. At that time, 1900s fashion designers, such as the incomparable Lucile, tightly controlled their mannequins, molding them into the “look” of their particular house. Mid-century models were given specific instruction in which expressions to wear and how to feel for a particular shoot. With the developing importance of capitalizing on the value of experiences and the body’s changeability, however, modeling work evolved into the professional free-for-all that it is today, where it is anybody’s guess what look clients will want from one moment to the next. Similar changes surfaced in methods for obtaining and portraying the ideal body recommended to models in published manuals of modeling “advice.” This chapter also explores how the popular language of model management draws back the curtain on how we envisage the “ideal” worker as a culture, since changes in instructions given to models over the years interestingly have dovetailed with significant changes in productive technologies during the same timeframe. This connection becomes particularly evident when tracing the advice given to models in modeling manuals from the 1920s to the 1960s, described here.

Here I outline how the turn toward affective branding has shaped a new image regime facilitating the model industry’s rapid expansion into a global network, broadening the field for scouting of prospective models, intensifying competition and turnover as a result. Increasing interest in tapping into affect’s vitality has intensified glamour labor as model managers have sought tighter control of their charges. This chapter tracks how the tightening of control over models was met with a widening field of scouting for new recruits to the industry. As the public’s exposure to and interest in fashion has grown apace, fashion weeks have proliferated beyond the traditional fashion hubs, and scouting for new models has reached into ever-more remote regions. Consequently, modeling contests have grown in size and number, modeling agencies have opened offices in dozens of countries, and fashion has become “news” as television shows and websites treating fashion became commonplace. Banking on the new value of mutability, model scouts ranged farther afield in search of that precious combination of features that might make millions. The age of the blink facilitated this expansion, converting more of the population into a standing reserve, made ready for their makeovers by a steady diet of reality television and twenty-four- hour access to the newest fashions, updated by the minute.

This chapter documents the racial parameters of the fashion aesthetic. While models of color are more prevalent in high-fashion images today, historically the modeling industry has been closed off from taking the kinds of risks that involve troubling the idea of “fashion” as dictated the given signs and symbols that have evolved within the corporate world. For black models the repertoire for creating a marketable look has traditionally been limited by stereotypes and cultural assumptions, which shape black models’ glamour labor in specific ways. Their self-branding has demanded more intense forms of bodywork and self-commodifying, at times using their race as part of their brand, while at times essentially erasing their racial characteristics by straightening their hair or pushing their bodies to fit a Euro-American standard. While my respondents experienced their race as something they created or dissimulated according to client’s whims, at the same time they were keenly aware of how their work was shaped by prevailing expectations of what “race” should look like, indicating the power of pre-existing racial tensions into which they must fit the aesthetics of the look they build when doing glamour labor.