1. “The look” as commodity: consumerism upgraded in contemporary fashion
As Mears contends, “fashion produces powerful representations of idealized class, gender, race, and sexual identities” (2011, p. 16). She acknowledges the fact that contemporary Western fashion plays an important part in the formation of contemporary cultural aesthetics: the fashion industry is more than selling goods, is influential in inscribing socially intelligible genders. In academia fashion images are constantly being studied from various angles, especially images of women:
Plenty of scholars from cultural studies, media studies, and feminist and intersectionality theory have analyzed the cultural meanings of fashion images and advertising. Feminist scholars have made the case that images of fashion models represent the objectification of women’s bodies, defining and enforcing normative ideals of feminine beauty that disparage all women, especially working-class and non-white women. In this sense, those women at the top of the display professions constitute “an elite corps deployed in a way that keeps millions of women in line. (Mears, 2011, p. 16)
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Western fashion can’t avoid assuming subjective and sometimes arbitrary aesthetic values. However, in Wissenger’s study (2009) on the relations between models and fashion brands, she rejects polarized readings of fashion models, which view them as “enforcers of oppressive body styles” (p. 274), or mysterious icons.
From her very own experience of fashion modeling, Mears (2011) discloses the fact that the “glamor” of fashion is rather constructed through fashion models’ bodies:
The backstage of fashion reveals a set of players — models, agents, and clients — and the peculiar rules of their game that usually remain hidden behind the brilliantly lit runways, the glossy magazine pages, and the celebrated glamour of fashion. (Mears, 2011, p. 5)
The models’ participation in the making of fashion images merits attention: we need to take in account the entire social context rather than just take a reductionist view of consumerism. In Wissinger’s study of the participation of models and consumers’ consumption of fashion products, what is discovered is an intertwined relation: While the model industry provides the “labor force” for many clients in selling goods, “it is also centrally important in the experience of being a consumer — by framing consumer experiences and encounters with commodities.” In her view, the models engage in the fashion industry through their “self-commodification,” as the models “create an image that will sell on the model market (2009, p. 274).
As she suggests, in modern times, models utilize their “looks” as commodities:
“the look” is sold as a commodity in fashion. Wissinger further points out that “[t]he model’s role in commodification and branding is multi-faceted. Most obviously, models lend their image to sell products, incorporating their likeness into the image of
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a brand” (2009, p. 274).
It is the main concern to view the models’ position in the whole fashion industry as significant as the designers’ and photographers’ authorship. Wissinger and
Entwistle regard them as “cultural intermediaries,” drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of
“field of cultural production” (2007, as cited in Wissinger, 2009, p. 277). As they view it, the models’ occupation involves symbolic production of meaning, “in taste-making or defining, shaping the ways in which we encounter and make sense of artefacts in their work of mediation” (Wissinger, 2009, p. 278).
If the aesthetic values in fashion are mediated through the bodies of models, then it is worthwhile to reconsider how the symbolic meaning is coded through the
production of the works of models in the European fashion industry.
2. Reading the model’s “look” as text: the male model’s body and gender
“performance” in fashion
In her view of the aesthetics-producing fashion industry, Mears (2011) asserts that fashion images reflect the intersection of the socially intelligible and project culturally idealized gendered body on the bodies of the models.
Models do much more than promote the sale of fashion. The model look promotes and disseminates ideas about how women and men should look.
Fashion images are prescriptions for masculinity and femininity. (Mears, 2011, p. 16)
She also finds empirical analysis to be more suitable than any objective anatomy,
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for fashion imagery cannot be treated as any ordinary commodity:
When dealing with aesthetic goods such as “beauty” and “fashionability,”
we would be hard-pressed to identify objective measures of worth inherent in the good itself. Rather, an invisible social world is hard at work behind the scenes of fashion to bequeath cultural value onto looks. (Mears, 2011, p.5)
Furthermore, from a post-structuralist point of view, the perspective here is taken from Mears’s view of models’ look as:
in fact a system of meanings, such as a language or a code, tied to a social evaluation system. People learn to read and decipher this code in order to see distinctions between one model and the next, as well as their positions within the bigger fashion picture. It represents not just a person or an individual beauty but also a whole system of knowledge and relations among people and positions connected within an industry. (Mears, 2011, p.
7)
Building on Butler’s idea of gender and performance (1990), Mears notes the dissociation of an interior “essence” of the gendered self from a gendered body:
Gender, we know, is a matter of active “doing,” not mere passive being, so modeling can be thought of as the professionalization of a certain type of gender performance, one that interlocks with race, sexuality, class, and other
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social positions. (Mears, 2011, p. 16)
From the perspective of consumption, a model serves as a medium of selling aesthetics of the body for the fashion industry. Yet, from the perspective of cultural critique in this thesis, the aesthetics of a model’s body in fact envisages a culturally
“intelligible body” in Bordo’s argument, as it reflects cultural conceptions of the body, norms of beauty, models of health (1993). Therefore the analysis here will focus on the masculinity of the male models, as asserted by Mears that fashion models are the profession for cultural conception of gender:
If modeling is the professionalization of gender performance, then it is a prime site to see the construction of masculinity and femininity, as well as race, sexuality, and class. (Mears, 2011, p. 16)
If the bodies of models as representations can be interpreted and read in multi-dimensions, then to decipher models’ looks is to re-evaluate the ideology of contemporary fashion which may reflect formulations of gender, class, and race in a given society. In the case of this study, male models play a critical role in the making of images of masculinity. First, the images created by the fashion industry legitimize the to-be-looked-at-ness of male bodies, contradicting the general prohibition to look at men’s body as argued by Mulvey (1975). What allows fashion to be viewed as an object of academic studies is its resemblance to cinema, as both involve a body for the spectator to project on—the body of the model. This body, in Mulvey’s understanding, is regarded as a surrogate of the spectator.
If a new possibility in men’s fashion can be constructed through consumption, its
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being a technique of self-representation and a lifestyle to live nonetheless forms a sex/gender identity against a pre-given one. This is why and how fashion is a worthy topic for academic work. In order to allow new possibilities of identifications, we ought to look at the significance of “other” masculinities in contemporary fashion such as masculinities of the “playboy” or the ”puritan,” as well as the association of men’s dress with social ranking, and the difference between formal and informal attire in men’s dress code (Edwards, 1997, pp. 15-17).
The contemporary constitution of fashion industry in the West mostly involves well-known fashion brands and fashion publishing. In Mort’s (1996) acute study of masculinity in contemporary men’s fashion, he is aware of the fact that the making of the fashion industry is collaborative. In his case study of the more avant-gardist fashion magazine in UK, The Face, he sees a whole range of supporting crew as
“imagemakers” including designers, photographers, dressers, editors, and models (1996).
The repertoire of fashion images, manifested in fashion campaigns or editorials in a magazine, includes largely the body of the model at the service of fashion.
However in current scholarship on contemporary fashion images, there has been little attention to the male models’ looks, despite their presence in the industry. What this thesis seeks to do is exactly to explore this little trodden path and examine the
imagery of the male fashion models as well as their gender performances, and also to see in what ways their works are significant in destabilizing hegemonic Western gender roles.
The materials to be studied include the imagery in fashion advertisements, runway looks, lookbooks or catalogues, ranging from prestigious fashion houses Milan and Paris to some avant-garde brands based in Europe, along with editorials in
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French, Italian or British trend/fashion-oriented magazines such as Arena Hommes Plus, 10 Men, and Vogue Hommes International. What will not be studied are
mainstream lifestyle magazines based mostly in the Anglophone world like GQ, Maxim, and FHM. Other than print materials, videos on Fashion TV, outtakes on
photographers’ or fashion bloggers’ websites will also be studied.
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II. GENESIS:
The rise of Adonis amid the anxiety of patriarchy