When Hollywood celebrities want to shine on the red carpet, they turn instinctively to voluptuous hair curls, classic body-skimming gowns and red-lipsticked pouts - all hallmarks of Old Hollywood Glamour, the look of movie sirens from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Take Katherine Heigl and Heidi Klum, who channelled Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich in red lipstick and swathes of flowing satin at the recent Emmy awards - and in supermodel Klum's case, with a slit right up to there.

Even rock chic Kate Moss glammed up in a vintage 1930s cream satin gown - although it unfortunately ripped when singer Courtney Love stepped on the train - at the Victoria & Albert Museum's Golden Age Of Couture gala in London last week.

And you can always count on hourglass- figured style stalwarts Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson to va-va-voom it up the old-school way each time they appear on the red carpet.

Gatsby-inspired fashion designs, a more relaxed sort of glamour, are ubiquitous season after season, though it is particularly noticeable now in American designer Marc Jacobs' current fall/winter collection, replete with long, belted silhouettes and elegant hats.

Home-grown label alldressedup is doing it too, with candy-stripe skirts and drop-waisted dresses in its recent spring collection titled The New Gatsby.

Glamour, defined in the dictionary as a noun describing 'the quality of fascinating, alluring, or attracting, especially by a combination of charm and good looks', sprung out of the Hollywood lexicon in the 1920s to the 1930s, an age when women wore flapper dresses and men - think suave Cary Grant - carried pocket watches.

Closely linked to the glamorous image was the femme fatale, the tragic siren, the highly strung and delicate romantic heroine in peril - embodied by Garbo and Dietrich, screen legends of the time. They were always wrapped up in very adult sequinned dresses, martini glasses and flutes of champagne.

Today, as style is being consumed by fast fashion (read: cheap, often inferior copies of runway looks), the obsession with Old Hollywood Glamour perhaps reflects a yearning for a more refined era that will outlive short closet cycles and resurgences of trends, like leggings and, ugh, acid-wash jeans.

After all, who wants to see another washed-up pop star in torn denim shorts, baring her flabby midriff onstage, at the petrol station, and while getting into a car accident with her young sons in tow?

Of course, one doesn't look appropriate going to every do wearing strings of antique pearls and all manners of feathered millinery.

And unless you're going to a costume party, it'd do you good to modernise your vintage pieces with 'now' accessories, like chunky necklaces, patent leather boots and colourful cocktail rings.

At the end of the day, Old Hollywood Glamour is more than a trend. It is a symbol of true, innate and timeless style. Seventy years ago, sexiness depended less on nudity than on how a fabric draped over the body - why should it be any different today?

But glamour is not a style that can be worn. It is an imaginative process that must be inspired.

Otherwise, no matter how beautiful, Hollywood's retro-glamour is only a coloured photocopy.

Few may recall George Hurrell (1904-1992), the quintessential photographer of Hollywood's Golden Age. In the stills he took from 1929 to 1942, languid women's downcast eyes are framed with impossibly long eyelashes. Light bounces from satin, while lacquer and bright tresses sprawl across the floor. Shadow and reflection create mystery, inviting viewers to fill in the unseen details according to their own desires.

Here, Urban recreates the glamorous feel of the past with the season's newest looks against the backdrop of an old school soon to be revived as a creative industries hub.

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