The Return of Glamour: Why Cinema Is Dressing Up Again

For a while, it seemed that glamour had vanished from cinema entirely. Realism reigned supreme. Directors stripped their stories bare, chasing authenticity through muted colour palettes and handheld cameras that trembled with documentary urgency. Nomadland gave us dust and denim. Marriage Story offered peeling walls and worn-out jumpers. The era of messy realism made perfect sense—it reflected audiences exhausted by polished lies, hungry for something that felt unvarnished and true.

But lately, something has shifted. The big screen is sparkling again.

Look at the past two years: Barbie, Saltburn, Challengers, Poor Things, House of Gucci. These films don’t just tell stories—they shimmer. They don’t hide their artifice; they celebrate it with unabashed joy. Cinemas have transformed into catwalks of colour, texture, and attitude. Audiences are buying tickets not just to watch a story unfold but to feel transported—wrapped in silk and light, watching characters who know exactly how to command a frame.

The return of glamour isn’t nostalgia. It’s rebellion.

Escaping the Grey Years

For nearly a decade, mainstream film seemed determined to appear ordinary. The prestige films of the 2010s were grey-toned confessionals. The camera studied human pain with documentary patience, refusing to look away. Think of Manchester by the Sea, The Revenant, or Moonlight. Each in its own way was brilliant, urgent, necessary—but they were built to make you feel the weight of life pressing down on your chest.

Then came a collective fatigue. Global uncertainty, lockdowns, climate dread—reality itself began to feel like a long art-house film with no intermission. So audiences sought out the opposite: spectacle. Colour. Pleasure. Not because they stopped caring about meaning, but because they needed beauty that wasn’t ashamed of itself.

When Barbie arrived in the summer of 2023, everything clicked into place. Greta Gerwig didn’t just paint the world pink; she reclaimed the right to make movies look gloriously, unapologetically good. Every costume by Jacqueline Durran, every architectural detail of Barbie Land, was a statement: artifice can be truth too. The film whispered what audiences had been craving—permission to enjoy beauty again without guilt or irony.

When Style Becomes Substance

Old-school critics often warned that style distracts from substance, that visual pleasure somehow cheapens deeper meaning. But today’s filmmakers know better. In Challengers, Luca Guadagnino uses luxury fashion as emotional armour. Zendaya’s crisp tennis whites, sharp tailoring, and glassy interiors aren’t mere decoration—they’re metaphors made manifest. The characters’ visual perfection is both seductive and suffocating. You can practically smell the sterile perfume of success, taste the champagne that never quite satisfies.

In Saltburn, Emerald Fennell pushes glamour until it curdles into something grotesque. The opulent country house gleams with inherited wealth, yet everything inside it quietly rots. The champagne baths and candlelit corridors don’t romanticize privilege; they expose its hollow core. It’s a visual joke about consumption—you can’t stop looking, even as you know it’s bad for you, even as you recognize the poison beneath the polish.

Poor Things, meanwhile, turns costume into philosophy. Emma Stone’s wardrobe grows wilder as her character gains freedom, each outfit a declaration of independence. The film’s fantasy aesthetic—pastel skies, inflated sleeves, surreal silhouettes—illustrates an inner evolution that dialogue alone couldn’t capture. Glamour here isn’t surface; it’s a language of liberation, of becoming.

In these films, design and psychology are completely fused. The wardrobe doesn’t just clothe the story; it writes it in fabric and colour.

Glamour as Self-Invention

Modern glamour is less about wealth than transformation. It’s a mirror of how people curate themselves online, how identity has become something you design rather than simply inherit. Filters, edits, avatars—all echo the cinematic dream of becoming larger than life, more vivid than reality allows.

When we watch Barbie strut through plastic perfection, we recognize something deeply familiar: the fantasy of total control over one’s image. When Zendaya steps onto a tennis court in a sculpted Prada dress, she’s performing the same digital poise we try to achieve in our own curated feeds. Cinema reflects that self-conscious desire to look like something—not to hide behind realism, but to declare identity through artifice.

That’s why today’s glamour feels more inclusive than the old Hollywood kind. In the 1940s, glamour meant a narrow idea of femininity—impeccable, white, polished, distant, untouchable. Now it can mean power, weirdness, audacity, chaos. Euphoria’s makeup bled into cinema, turning eyeliner into rebellion. Everything Everywhere All at Once gave us absurdity dressed as transcendence, hot dog fingers as profound as any Bergman close-up. Glamour has loosened its corset and learned to breathe.

The Economics of Escapism

There’s also a practical truth behind this shift: beautiful films sell. Audiences who stream countless stories at home will still pay premium prices to see something visually overwhelming on a massive screen. Streaming has normalized “good writing.” What gets you to a cinema now is good spectacle—the kind that demands to be experienced collectively, in the dark, with strangers who gasp at the same moments.

Barbie earned more than a billion dollars. Saltburn became a meme factory, its bathtub scene launching a thousand TikToks. Challengers sold not only tickets but entire fashion lines, tennis skirts flying off racks worldwide. Glamour, once seen as old-fashioned and frivolous, has become a marketing engine that prints money.

The fashion world knows this intimately. Designers no longer wait for red carpets—they collaborate directly with filmmakers during production. Gucci partnered with Ridley Scott. Loewe dressed Challengers. The result blurs the line between cinema and campaign, between storytelling and advertising. The screen becomes both mirror and marketplace.

Critics sometimes bristle at that commercial sheen, dismissing it as corporate synergy run amok. But it’s nothing new. Classic Hollywood built entire industries on the idea that movies could sell dreams—and dresses, and lipstick, and lifestyles. What’s changed is the tone: the dream is now self-aware. Barbie winks at its product tie-ins. Saltburn weaponizes aesthetics to critique the very consumerism it depicts. The audience is in on the joke, which makes the pleasure more complex, more interesting.

Glamour and the Female Gaze

One of the most fascinating dimensions of this new glamour is who’s behind the camera. Many of the films leading the charge are directed by women—Gerwig, Fennell, Lanthimos’s collaborator Emma Stone as producer, Sofia Coppola with Priscilla.

Their take on beauty is fundamentally different. It’s less about seduction and more about agency. In Barbie, beauty is performance—fun until it hurts, liberating until it becomes a cage. In Priscilla, glamour becomes a gilded prison, with each perfectly applied eyeliner flick marking another layer of control. These directors understand viscerally that surface can both empower and imprison. They use glamour to ask uncomfortable questions: who benefits from beauty? Who pays its price?

The female gaze reclaims the frame from voyeurism. It allows women to look extraordinary without becoming objects, to be visually stunning without being consumed. Gerwig’s candy colours and Coppola’s quiet rooms both use aesthetic excess to express interior life. The result is glamour with moral tension—beautiful, yes, but aware of its cost, its complications, its contradictions.

The Digital Mirror

Another reason glamour feels urgently relevant again is the influence of technology. Artificial intelligence, virtual influencers, and CGI artistry have normalized hyperreal imagery. The line between “real” and “constructed” has dissolved completely. So audiences no longer demand realism; they demand coherence within the unreal, emotional truth within the artificial.

Films like Barbie or Poor Things thrive in that in-between space. Their worlds are too perfect to be natural, but too emotional to be fake. The artifice becomes comfort—proof that design and emotion can coexist, that beauty and meaning aren’t enemies.

In an age where even phone cameras auto-correct our faces, where AI can generate perfect images of things that never existed, glamour feels paradoxically honest about the lie. It doesn’t pretend to be documentary truth. It says, “This is fiction, and that’s okay. That’s the point.”

There’s a subtle liberation in that admission. Cinema used to sell illusion as reality, asking us to believe the trick. Now it sells illusion as art, inviting us to admire the craft. The sparkle no longer deceives; it declares itself.

Why Glamour Actually Matters

Some critics dismiss this resurgence as distraction—a pastel escape from real issues, frivolous entertainment while the world burns. But glamour, when handled with intention and intelligence, can do what realism sometimes can’t: make emotion visible, tangible, unforgettable.

A dress can express ambition more clearly than dialogue. A chandelier can reflect power dynamics better than exposition. A lipstick shade can signal rebellion louder than a manifesto. Visual pleasure is part of storytelling grammar, not decoration around it. It’s another language, equally valid, equally powerful.

More importantly, glamour creates distance—the kind that lets audiences see themselves clearly. Realism sometimes traps us inside emotion, so close we can’t gain perspective. Glamour lifts us above it, turning pain into pattern, chaos into choreography. It shows that beauty and complexity can share the same frame, that surface and depth aren’t opposites but partners.

Nostalgia, Rewired

It’s tempting to read today’s glamour revival as simple nostalgia, a retreat into comforting aesthetics. After all, Saltburn borrows the decadence of Brideshead Revisited, Barbie nods to Technicolor musicals, and Poor Things channels silent-era surrealism. But these films aren’t longing for the past—they’re remixing it, sampling it, making it strange again.

Their glamour feels like collage, like bricolage. Digital cameras, vintage references, ironic humour, sincere emotion—it’s not pure sincerity, it’s strategy. The nostalgia is aesthetic, not emotional. It’s about using old beauty to say new things, to ask contemporary questions in vintage costume.

That’s why audiences in 2025 don’t just passively admire these films; they remix them right back. TikTok edits, fashion trends, fan art, Halloween costumes—the audience participates in the glamour, makes it their own. Cinema no longer dictates the dream from on high; it shares it, collaborates on it, releases it into the wild.

The Future of Glamour

If this is a cycle, and cinema moves in cycles, what comes next? Possibly intimate spectacle—films that mix excess with rawness, beauty with vulnerability. We’re already seeing it in Challengers: a world of visual gloss that hides deep loneliness, perfect surfaces concealing desperate need. The next phase of glamour may not abandon realism but merge with it, creating something hybrid and new.

Technology will accelerate this evolution. As AI-generated imagery becomes more sophisticated, directors can design entire worlds that obey emotional logic rather than physical realism. Imagine a romantic drama that looks like a perfume ad but feels like a gut punch. A thriller lit like a fashion editorial but paced like a panic attack. Visual pleasure will keep evolving, but the essence will stay: cinema as dreamspace, as alternative reality, as beautiful lie that tells emotional truth.

Glamour will never again mean perfection; it will mean expression. It will belong to whoever uses it to reveal truth, not conceal it. To whoever understands that sparkle can be substance, that beauty can bite.

Closing Scene

When Barbie stood on that pink pavement in the film’s final moments, heels clicking toward the real world, it marked a quiet moment of cultural return. After years of films obsessed with the bleak and the broken, with showing us ourselves at our most ordinary and exhausted, we were ready to look again—to admire, to marvel, to believe in transformation.

Glamour is not denial of reality; it’s its counterpoint, its necessary opposite. It reminds us that beauty, like hope, demands effort. The sequins, the symmetry, the colour—all of it says: we can still make meaning shine. We can still create wonder in a dark room.

Cinema dressing up again is not regression or escapism. It’s recovery. It’s remembering that film can do more than reflect reality—it can reimagine it, reshape it, make it shimmer.

We don’t go to the movies to see ourselves exactly as we are. We go to remember that transformation is possible, that beauty matters, that surface can be profound. And sometimes, transformation begins with a costume change, a splash of colour, a decision to stop apologizing for wanting things to look beautiful.

The screen is sparkling again. And we’re ready to watch it shine.