Cute underload
Last week, Princeton held a conference called “Too Cute: American Style and the New Asian Cool,” and Virginia Postrel was on hand to explain the differences between being cute and being glamorous. (Postrel, after all, runs a Web site called “Deep Glamour,” and wrote an excellent book on a related subject: The Substance of Style.) The differences, far from being thoroughly inchoate, as I might have thought, are apparently not particularly difficult to quantify:
Do not, however, peg your future happiness to finding someone with the perfect blend thereof:
The two rarely coexist, since they entail contradictory qualities. Mix them, and the cuteness tends to win out, canceling out the glamour altogether or producing something disturbing or comical.
I console myself with the thought that someday (ten years from now, actually) Zooey Deschanel will be 40.
fillyjonk »
11 March 2010 · 5:18 pm
That checklist is interesting. And confirms something about me I suspected for a while: I am probably too “goofy” to ever be glamorous.
I wonder what a cute 80 year old looks like? Betty White?