Are you sitting comfortably? Well stop that right now if you want the vamp look because tracksuits and slippers it is not.
We’re talking sky high heels and body-conscious clothing, the sort of get up that is only suitable for walking from a lobby to a limo – where once inside you have to lie down along the seat because you can’t bend in the middle.
The other components are heavy black eyeliner, red lippy and a take-no-prisoners attitude – just your basic office party survival kit.
The term has been attributed to a 1935 edition of Vogue which featured Turkish women outlining their eyes with henna, as the ancient Egyptians had done, and indeed the first vamp may have been Cleopatra.
‘Oh the vamp’
But vamp, short for vampire, was in use before that as a now outdated term to describe a femme fatale who bewitches men, relieving them of their dignity and fortune.
Silent movie actress Theda Bara was nicknamed The Vamp after the studios pretended she was the occultist offspring of an Arab sheik when in fact she was a tailor’s daughter from Cincinnati.
Her name was an anagram of “Arab death” and she was typecast as a dangerously seductive woman with an exotic background and a cold heart.
In her films she wore a lot of eyeliner and very revealing costumes before the Hollywood Production Code banned such attire in 1930.
Political correctness dictates that the meaning of the word vamp is not what it was 100 years ago.
In 1922, a woman writing to the Oakland Tribune put it like this: “Oh the vamp, she’s a witch, she’s a terror, she’s a menace. She’s the one who leads our men astray. They are little helpless darlings.”
Vamp it up with our top picks:
