Look

A less elegant term for “style,” a word that well defined people such as Jacqueline Kennedy, Marcello Mastroianni, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and even Mother Teresa of Calcutta. If style is connected to the body and soul of an individual, one’s look represents a person without taking into account his or her mind or personality. Bleached hair or violet streaks give a punk look, Morticia’s make-up tells us she is a vamp, a pantsuit identifies a manageress on the upward path, a cigar in the mouth suggests a man “who never asks.” The important thing is that appearance (even better if branded) prevails over substance. The look is an invention of the 1960s and, at least in origin, indicates a “sense of belonging”: to a social class or a political group, to a caste or a gang. Consequently, almost by chance, generations of cloned androids began to appear in the pages of fashion magazines and weeklies. Dozens of professionals with their watch fastened on top of their shirt cuff, industrial quantities of socialites toting a Kelly (the first to do so was Princess Grace) or a branded backpack (in this case the model was Madonna, another person whose image is based purely on looks rather than style), thousands of young men wearing Blues Brothers sunglasses, hundreds of children looking as though they are fresh from a wedding at Buckingham Palace: all of them imitators of someone else. “Look” is certainly a hateful term when used in this way: it has only one acceptable meaning, when it is connected to an individual’s personality or mind. Otherwise it would do better to disappear from the dictionary.