I know that everyone’s internet looks different and is personalized to them. But if you’re like me, there was a period where you couldn’t log on to YouTube without getting suggested videos from a creator named Jonna Jinton. Jonna is Swedish, and lives in the tiny northern Swedish of Grundtjarn (population: 12). Jonna is a 32-year-old painter, photographer, and jewelry designer, who also makes vlogs about her daily life. It’s not that surprising to me that I kept getting suggestions for her content--I had recently subscribed to a couple similar accounts, including the American YouTuber Isabel Paige, who lives alone in the mountains of Washington State in a tiny house.
What surprised me was my response when I finally watched one of Jonna’s videos.
The first video of hers I watched was dated from June 2020, and I watched it about a month after it was posted, in July 2020. It was called “Midsummer magic and some struggles.” The thumbnail was an arresting image of Jonna, dressed in white, wading into a mirror-smooth lake, surrounded by forest. That’s how the video begins, too. Through voiceover, Jonna chronicles the changes in her environment now that it’s June--the wildflowers, the midnight sun--in flawless, lightly accented English. We see shots of fresh wildflowers, the clouds moving over the lake, mist hovering over a meadow. All the while, soft piano music is mixed in with sounds of songbirds. Then the rest of the video is a montage of Jonna’s life--she has coffee with her mother and her husband and her great-uncle Tage who plays the accordion. She and Johan plant some potatoes in the garden and clean out an old boat they’ve bought from a neighbor. Jonna then walks us through the process of filming her last video. It’s all rather ordinary on the face of it.
But this video stirred deep feelings in me. I realized how much I had been longing for a life like Jonna’s--a life where I, too, could support myself through my creative work, and live in a house near a forest, next to a lake, with all four seasons, with a husband who adored me and a sweet dog. It’s a simple dream, but the desire for it was so powerful after I watched Jonna’s video that it made me cry. Over the next few days I watched dozens of her videos, desperate to soak in what felt like a strange, mysterious, irresistible magic.
My question is: what is it that happened to me?
Eventually it struck me that it was glamour.
Glamour As A Phenomenon
That might sound bizarre to you. These days, most people think ‘glamour’ is in some way synonymous with celebrity or wealth; it’s used as shorthand to describe anything fancy, expensive, or shiny. Red lipstick, mirrored armoires, private jets--these things are all considered glamorous. But the truth is, glamour isn’t an aesthetic category. Here I must defer to the philosopher Virginia Postrel’s definition: glamour is, she writes, a form of “nonverbal rhetoric, which moves and persuades not through words but through images, concepts, and totems...by binding image and desire, glamour gives us pleasure, even as it heightens our yearning. It leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.”
Glamour, the word, comes from old Scots, and its original meaning referred to a shapeshifting spell, or a spell that otherwise clouded the vision. Virginia Postrel, in her book The Power of Glamour, essentially posits that this original meaning remains. Glamour is an interior phenomenon, created as a response to an external stimulus. It is at work within us, and it causes us to long for transformation.
That was what happened to me as I watched Jonna’s videos of her life. I longed for my own life to change, and become more like hers. I imagined myself in her place, setting off across a grand wilderness to gain inspiration for my artwork. I imagined myself making a living through my writing and artistic talent. What’s more, I don’t think I’m alone. Jonna’s videos routinely get 2 or 3 million views, and the comments below are full of people like me, who seem to be under the same spell. One commenter writes, “if I had to dream a life for myself it would be like yours..the beauty, the love, family that gets along...the joy you have for all things.” Another says, devoid of punctuation, “I can't even explain how much positivity you bring to my life whenever I watch your videos You bring a sense of peace to me that I cannot explain I love your life and wish it could be mine.”
“I can't stop watching. Oh, how the heart longs for this ‘ideal.’”
“When someone asks me what my dream life looks like, I just tell them to go watch it on Jonna's channel.”
“This video truly touched my heart like no other, you don't even know how much it meant to me... It awakened me about my life and dreams in a way that words can't express!”
“Thank you Jonna! These videos give me so much hope of someday being free.”
There are hundreds of comments like this, on all of her videos.
Of course, the true phenomenon of glamour is not one-size-fits all. People want different things, and therefore different images will be glamorous to them. James Bond is an icon of glamour for many men, while women look at how often his female companions die and wrinkle their noses. Jonna is glamorous to me, but someone else my age who wishes to move to New York City would balk at needing to chop wood to survive the winter. Glamour is highly personal, and in order for it to occur, the image or advertisement or video must appear before the right audience.
The Glamour Deficit In The Digital Age
So why am I writing about this? Well, glamour is in short supply these days if you really think about it because of the shift from glamour to accessibility within the celebrity class. “Relatable” is the buzzword of the day, obviously ushered in by the advent of social media. A lot of celebrities have podcasts now--or they appear as guests on each other’s podcasts--where they reveal that they don’t bathe their children, or that they argue with their spouse about the correct way to slice a tomato. Kristen Bell and her husband Dax Shepherd have made careers out of oversharing online; so has Jada Pinkett Smith with the Red Table Talk series. We don’t want our celebrities to be mysterious ciphers like Greta Garbo. Nor do we want our celebrities to cultivate a persona like Marilyn Monroe, a highly developed character for the far more complicated, skittish, and fragile Norma Jeane to hide behind. If a modern-day celebrity appears to do this in any way, like Lana Del Rey taking a stage name, the critics cry foul; how can she be relatable when she changed her name? She must be a ‘fake person,’ because she wears false eyelashes to walk to the corner store, because she has a stage name, because she presents herself with a certain kind of old-school mystery, aloofness, and sorrow--especially early in her career.
No, instead we have this idea that celebrities are ‘just like us,’ and therefore owe us some token of emotional vulnerability or connection. They owe it to us to prove that they are just like us. We want them to ‘be themselves,’ despite the fact that most celebrities are famous because they’re performers. We want them to be ‘relatable,’ and more precisely, we want them to attempt to relate to us. And this is a new development, one presaged by the rise of social media. Even a messier celebrity of yore, like Frank Sinatra, would never divulge in an interview that he and second wife Ava Gardner once had a giant fight on a sinking ship about toilet paper (yes, this happened). Also, Frank Sinatra was exceptional. He was terminally human, he sinned, he made mistakes, he hurt people--but he was also a musical genius. You may relate to him because of his neuroses, or because of the profound loneliness so palpably expressed across his musical catalogue. But you will never relate to the experience of being Frank Sinatra, because you don’t hear the music of the golden spheres. Even if he chased press attention sometimes, he also had his house in Palm Springs where he could hide away. He had a public persona, and then the private Frank was separate. We don’t want our celebrities to have private lives anymore. The nature of what we expect from celebrities has fundamentally changed.
Jonna Jinton As Glamour Case Study
Appearing ‘accessible’ and ‘relatable’ has become the new currency of celebrity. Jonna, as a content creator and influencer (and therefore a kind of celebrity), has to make emotional connections with her followers in order to be successful. In past videos, she’s opened up tearfully about an energy company’s attempts to cut down the forest where she lives and turn it into wind turbines. She and Johan, her husband, have talked about how they met--they connected on the internet, but they were both so shy their first meeting almost didn’t happen. For an ‘influencer’ with a large public platform--three million subscribers and nearly a million Instagram followers--creating an emotional bond with followers is an essential part of the job, and Jonna does it well.
But she also never gives away too much. For about the first six months of 2021, Johan suddenly stopped being featured in Jonna’s vlogs. She never directly addressed his absence, which caused rampant speculation in the comments under videos, that maybe their marriage was on the rocks. In more recent vlogs, he’s returned to appearing on camera, and they seem happy together. And we will never know what happened to cause Johan’s prolonged absence from the videos. Maybe he experienced a sudden illness, mental or physical. Maybe they did separate for a time. Maybe an illness or death in the family made him unavailable. Maybe it had nothing to do with him, and Jonna decided to keep him out of videos for another reason. But assuming, just for argument’s sake, that there had been some kind of conflict between them, Jonna’s decision to keep him out of the videos does two things.
First, it of course protects their privacy. Second, it also keeps the feeling of glamour mostly intact. Part of what glamour does as non-verbal rhetoric, is that it hides what is truly disappointing or burdensome about life. Occasionally it may make a mild setback appear humorous, but glamour always glides over more serious problems, like marital strife. (Once again, I’m not trying to say one way or another why Johan wasn’t featured in her videos, and Jonna is under no obligation to explain his absence. I’m just using that situation as an example.)
Another way Jonna creates glamour in her content is her sensitive understanding of certain archetypal images. Almost every year, she makes a St Lucia Day video during Christmas time, and films herself gliding over the snow in the polar night of Sweden, a glowing crown of real candles on top of her head, just like the fabled saint. The result is truly beautiful, even moving. (For all I know, there are millions of people walking around with candles on their heads every St Lucia Day in Sweden, but I do not know, having only been there in summer. These are the same people who do a dance where they pretend to be frogs at Midsommar. Anything is possible.) When she films herself exploring wild nature, she often wears white dresses, which stand out starkly against the surroundings. The white dresses lend her an angelic, maiden-like quality. In several videos, she films herself singing to the cows. She practices the ancient Nordic art of kulning, a kind of high-pitched yodel full of ‘blue tones,’ that calls the cows down from mountain pastures back home. This is a tradition that dates back several centuries at least, maybe even longer. During the summer, farmers sent their cow herds to the North, and usually women were in charge of them for this duration. The cows were allowed to roam freely, and at night, the women would call them home. Here the glamorous quality is her simple ability to enact a certain kind of ancient magic, a dying art. When I was watching one of these videos, my cat’s ears pricked up when he heard Jonna’s kulning. Animals really do respond to it.
She also embodies common conceptions of Viking imagery and the general toughness of Nordic peoples. In one popular video, she takes an ice bath in the frozen lake, then relaxes by a fire, raising her thermos of coffee to the camera, saying ‘skal!’ The cavalier attitude she adopts throughout is charming; no doubt she cut out at least a few frames of herself shivering after she got out of the water. In another video she pretends to do “laundry” by carrying her laundry basket through a thick blanket of snow. These videos are designed to be humorous, but they also demonstrate a cheerful imperviousness to the elements, a kind of stoic strength, that I wish I had myself. (I’m from California. I’m not good with the cold.)
But the most powerful vectors of glamour are the ones I mentioned earlier--the simplicity and wholesomeness of her life, her closeness to nature, and her ability to make a living by her art.
What Is It All About, Though?
I don’t think Jonna has set out to be a glamorous person, to cast this spell on people that makes them wish to transform their lives--I believe she genuinely wants to share her life with us, and her beautiful surroundings. She shares enough of the quotidian struggles of her life--when the cows won’t go to the right field and run off, when a window breaks in her studio and it’s filled with snow--that I don’t think concocting glamour is a conscious goal for her. But that brings me back to the point that glamour depends on the person who beholds the picture, the video, the advertisement. Glamour makes even small accidents seem appealing to the right audience.
Jonna has found that audience. Why is Jonna’s life stirring up this response in millions of people? I believe there are a few reasons. First, Jonna’s life hasn’t been as disrupted as ours have by the pandemic, because she lives in a village with twelve people, far away from any major town. Her rural position has insulated her from things like restaurant closures and mask mandates. The pandemic has affected Jonna’s life—her father had to quarantine for several days after returning from Gothenburg, and the customary family gatherings at holidays stopped. But little about Jonna’s day-to-day life seemed to change. The specter of mass death is very real in Sweden, but in its vast hinterlands, it’s so sparsely populated that little about life has changed. In the midst of the worst months of the pandemic, when it seemed like the vaccine would never arrive, that life would never get better, Jonna’s videos represented the dreams of millions of city-dwellers, desperate for fresh air, freedom from crowds, and freedom of movement.
Second, and more significantly, Jonna makes a living through her art. Her work is deeply meaningful and creatively fulfilling. I think millions of people have been through this reckoning with their jobs recently. How many jobs really are kind of meaningless? How many jobs have become impossibly demanding, like teaching, nursing, waitressing, firefighting, or logistics? How many people have been working too hard for too long for too little pay? Content like Jonna’s allows those of us who are unsatisfied in our jobs to dream that another kind of life is possible, where our unique talents and gifts are truly valued. Jonna gets to be her own boss; she owns the jewelry business, the web shop where you can buy photography prints and paintings, and she’s in charge of her own YouTube schedule. She doesn’t have to do sponsorships; her videos function as effective marketing for her jewelry and other products. It hasn’t always been that way--Jonna’s been working to make this dream a reality for ten years. Still, that kind of freedom appeals to many people with less autonomy in their work.
Third, Jonna lives close to nature, and it’s nature that appears relatively well-preserved from the march of climate change. So many people my age specifically suffer from eco-grief, a profound sense of loss. Over the past year, there have been catastrophic fires and floods across the entire world. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans live in a county that was struck by a weather disaster between June and September of 2021, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal disaster declarations. Jonna’s videos present a small corner of the world where forests are allowed to grow tall...where there are still four seasons. There are shadows on the edges, however. Areas close to where Jonna lives are scarred by deforestation. If you look into Sweden’s actual record on forest preservation, it’s not all that great. For instance--since 2000, Sweden has lost more than 19,000 sq miles of tree cover, not accounting for replanting, or 17%, according to Global Forest Watch. Most cleared areas are replanted with monoculture plantations to be harvested again in 60 to 80 years. But even though these trees are being replaced with new trees, more than 70% of Sweden’s lichen-rich forest has disappeared in the past 60 years. This disproportionately affects northern Sweden’s indigenous Sapmi people. Their culture and livelihoods are closely tied to that of the reindeer, which rely on lichen for survival. Jonna has also talked about this problem in videos and on social media. But I wouldn’t be surprised, once it’s easier to travel internationally, if Jonna’s videos alone drive a boom in tourism to Sweden’s more rural areas and national parks. Dozens of comments from viewers mention a desire to travel to Sweden and experience the beauty of nature there. Her videos are an effective argument that there’s economic value to be had in preserving wild spaces.
Why Glamour Matters
I bought a piece of jewelry from Jonna’s web shop last November. It was the only thing on her website I could personally afford, a simple chain bracelet. It took a long time to get to me, of course. But when I opened the package and tried it on, it was truly a thing of beauty. The silver gleamed with such vibrancy, it was like it created its own little pool of sunlight, even in the dim short days of December. It reminded me of the glistening snow outside Jonna and Johan’s smithy, the reflective surface of the ice on the lake near their house.
So yeah, one lesson you could take from this--if you’re a fucking mercenary--is that glamour as a marketing strategy works on people. (And a note from a fellow mercenary: I have been studying this phenomenon for years and can apply it to messaging for businesses! Call me!) But another lesson, the one that’s stuck with me for about a year and a half now, is just that glamour as a phenomenon can be extraordinarily productive. The dream of a life like Jonna’s motivates me more than anything external pressure; the gleam of her silver chain on my wrist makes me believe my own dreams will someday, too, be manifest. The fact that she has made my values--creative freedom, close relationships, closeness with nature--into something glamorous, it validates them.
After I discovered her, I started painting and drawing again, two practices I had mostly abandoned. I went on solo camping trips to wild places. I started to take my own writing talent seriously, instead of casting it off as a horrible defect because my longing to be a writer had always seemed at odds with living a traditional, conventional life. She allowed me to come to terms with the fact that I don’t want a conventional life. And not to be ashamed of it.
Jonna’s videos show us that glamour can nudge us toward the lives we’re meant to be living. The lives we craft for ourselves.