Glamour School: Mirror, Mirror

If you’ve endured any of this summer’s box office hits, you’ve probably seen a trailer for Mirrors, Kiefer Sutherland’s upcoming exploration of the sinister world through the looking glass.

The trailer features some requisite hair-raising elements: creepy children’s laughter, the phrase “I want to play,” and horribly disfigured faces gazing back at you from above the bathroom sink. Thing is, this is way mirrors used to be ALL THE TIME; they were so rare as to be considered magical artifacts, capable of showing everything from your future husband to Bloody Mary (the slumber party jury is still out on that one).

(Ed note: This is my stripper anthem!)

It is only thanks to the wonders of mass production that we can now gaze lovingly at our reflection without fear of ghost or ghoul. Unless, of course, you are “a troubled ex-cop who must save his family from an unspeakable evil that is using mirrors as a gateway into their home.”

The mirror is typically the last gestational stage of an outfit, after which it bursts fully formed from your womb/room. Anyone who cares enough to actually complain about these things (hand raised) knows the frustration of living WITHOUT a full-length mirror in the home: standing on the toilet seat to check shoe-skirt coordination in the medicine cabinet, puzzling at the blurry colors reflected by kitchen chrome.

Even for those fancy enough to own a big and accurate mirror, however, the impulse to look is never satisfied. Reflections can change with every glance, thus leading to constant and unending rubbernecking in front of display windows, shiny marble fronts, and the glass-heavy Rolex store at 17th and Walnut. While some people have it worse than others–enlisting spoons and doorknobs to their shiny OCD army, for example–it’s still difficult to go an entire day without seeing yourself reflected at least once.

Not so for Narcissus, who having never seen his own face or finished that unit about water’s refractive properties, fell in love with himself quite by accident. This is completely understandable, as glass mirrors weren’t manufactured until around the first century. It took about a millennia longer for someone to hazard a guess on how the things worked, anyway. In his eleventh-century Book of Optics, Ibn al-Haytham (who competes with Aristotle on a
Google search for “the first scientist” but wins because he’s featured on currency) proposed that “Every visible object that is not a direct light source is a kind of mirror” – which seems about right since, barring the Sun, people will check their teeth for spinach in pretty much any surface at hand. Without reliable access to Wikipedia, however, most peasants didn’t hear about this, or other advances in optics that ushered in the telescope, microscope, and oh, basically the entire Renaissance.

Instead, they thought about mirrors as they had for centuries: a tool of the occult, used for fortune-telling, ritual and trapping the eternal soul, not a trifle in which to magnify one’s pores.

Fast forward 800 primp-free years and we find Justus von Liebig, father of fertilizer, patenting a process to cheaply coat glass with a thin layer of silver. A few assembly lines later the things hit the market, and by 1900 affordable mirrors – full-length and hand-held – were widely available to the public. Through the twin technology of photography, a newly monied leisure class, and a few ads for face powder, collective fears that mirrors might reflect an evil spirit gave way to a general anxiety that the hag in the glass might just be you.

Upon casual reflection, I noticed that people got a lot more done back when we didn’t have full-length mirrors: inventing agriculture, memorizing epic poems, crafting the Constitution. And, contrary to what you might think after spending 20 minutes deciding between lacy pastel tops, they had totally bangin’ outfits too (witness the latest prairie dress revival). So the next time you find yourself bereft of mirror or spoon, embrace it as a vintage moment. Your resulting look may become the stuff of legend.

Ed note: I feel this way a lot.