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From the perspective of American cultural aesthetics, Johnson believes such an aesthetic, with the downsizing of men’s silhouette in “Hedi-slimanization,” hardly corresponds to the “conventional” “masculine ideal of as recently as 2000,” namely “a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs”, or in the shape of “bulkiness” of the American cultural ideal male body, recognized by Bordo in 1993. As he comments that “the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt” (2008), the male aesthetic is now in an edge of retreat which seems to upset the social norms. Despite the social controversy brought out by new silhouettes in “Hedi-slimanization,” I would like to draw on Evans’s contention that the contemporary European fashion industry recuperates “the repressed” or “the fear” in the historical trajectory of modernity in such representation of masculinity. Such a shift in masculinity from archaic sexiness to the lengthened, reduced androgyny in the muses of Hedi Slimane not only mirrors the dissatisfaction of monochromatic American aesthetics, but also the danger of phallocentric masculinity that has been a long-repressed subject in Western culture, which has now been disclosed in the transition of epochs.
As Evans argues, “the relevance of Renaissance and Baroque imagery on the one hand and the spectacle of nineteenth-century consumption on the other suggest that we are currently in a stage of capitalist transition as those of the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries” (p. 10). Such characteristics of male models’ physique is referring to the Mannerism style in disproportion and exaggeration in relation to the Renaissance period as a transition to Baroque styles, like the elongated style of Parmigianino’s Madonna with the Long Neck (1534-40) (figure 22). However, this is not to say that contemporary men’s fashion is in postmodernist aesthetics of pastiche and replicating Mannerism styles in a contemporary context. On the contrary, I argue that such deviation from the Western phallic ideal of “male beauty”, induced by Dior
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Homme, is rather a modernist style to male aesthetics in a contemporary social context, which is based on archaic, heroic, omnipotent or even phallic bodies such as the Hellenic prototype of Belvedere Torso for Michelangelo (figure 23). Such style denotes that the Western masculinity is mutating into a new breed, internally
destabilizing the social concept of monochromatic normalcy of phallic “male beauty”
in a process of rewind and rejuvenation that has already started since the emergence of New Lad.
The lengthened, mannerist style of aesthetics of contemporary male models is no longer returning to the phallic body with its relevance to virility and male sexuality as the “new” definition of masculinity, but reversely questions the omnipotent and phallocentric definition of virility in masculinity with the slim and reduced bodies of the male models, especially from the monochromatic and essentialist perspective of globalized American masculinity. And while Johnson’s interpretation has envisaged the tension between the monochromatic American ideal “beefcake” masculinity in the West and the contemporary mannerist representation of male aesthetics in Europe, from a more radical and phobic perspective of the Anglophone press, such a reduced silhouette is “glamorizing” anorexia and the underdevelopment of men.19 However, from Evans’s modernist perspective, the slim look of Dior Homme draws on the Modernist homo-/death-phobia and the symptomatic bodies as the dark side in contrast to the All-American toned look, which seems to be a humanist ideal on the bright side, with all its connotation to virility and liveliness:
19 In May 2010, the British newspaper, The Observer published an eye-catching article by Tracy McVeigh titled “Skinny Male Models and New Fashions Fuel Eating Disorders among Men: Anorexia, Bulimia and Obsession with Bodily Shape Is No Longer Just a Feminine Matter.” The article is at pains to point out the emergence of a new male pathology, “manorexia,” the body dysmorphia of men. In the very beginning of the article, the author takes issue with the fashion industry and holds it responsible for a “morbid trend” that “[s]kinny models, clothes designed for unrealistic body shapes and pressures at work are all fuelling an increase in eating disorders and body anxiety, as well as a rise in demand for cosmetic surgery.”
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In the 1990s, a certain strand of fashion design, photography, make-up and styling was pervaded by explicit references to death. It was a minority strand that revealed the melancholy death’s head beneath the skin.
Meanwhile the highly glossy, optimistic images of much Italian, French and American mainstream fashion, with their emphasis on healthy, toned bodies, continued to deny the pain of loss and to seek to hold death at bay. The two kinds of imagery co-existed, in different magazines and on different
runways, like the paired figures of the living and the dead in the medieval Dance of Death – one celebratory and life-affirming, the other inexorably signaling its opposite. (Evans, 2003, p. 223)
While Evans contends that the modernity in contemporary fashion rather plays on such a dualist manner of life and death, my argument here extends her view of modernist memento mori theme in contemporary European fashion imagery as masquerade, which, is almost like the mirror image of the Gibson Girl in All is Vanity (1908) (figure 24), illustrated cleverly by Charles Dana Gibson. In the portrait of a lively and modern young girl grooming in front of her cosmetics table, looking at her reflection, it however projects a deathly skull from a distance.
In fact, the theme of memento mori is recurrent in Western art and appears as masquerade, such as Jean de Dinteville in Hans Holbein the Younger’s The
Ambassadors (1533) (figure 25). Evans therefore extends the metaphor of imagery as
masquerade with the example of The Painter Hans Burgkmair and his Wife Anna by Lucas Furtenagel (1529) (figure 26), which secretly reveals the message of death or deadliness to the living figures in paintings and spectators as well, albeit often
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requiring scrutiny. It is the main metaphor of imagery as masquerade that this thesis is based on and I will continue to argue that fashion imagery at times reveals the dualist themes in a masquerade. For Evans, mainstream fashion imagery, in contrast to the avant-garde Parisian fashion imagery which projects deathly and decadent themes, seems to project humanist optimism, light, power and liveliness through the toned, healthy bodies and keeps darkness and death at bay in catering to mass consumption.
However, I wish to argue in thesis that since masquerade is achieved through dualism, inbetween life and death or even male and female, the largely appreciated and
valorized male muscularity rather mirrors the Western/American obsessive normalcy of omnipotent masculinity in a symptomatic manner, which appears in virility and health, but in fact can be unknowingly deadly.
In Evans’s citation from Beard’s (1999) cultural critique in i-D20, sheer perfection of the female supermodels’ bodies can be even more deadly, and that
“perhaps the likes of [Cindy] Crawford and Claudia Schiffer were always closer to walking corpuses than anyone dared to imagine” (as cited in Evans, 2003, p. 176). My contention here further links such perfect “sexiness” of gender ideal to her critique of reification by putting a female in the place on display in her reading of Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, posing in a window against the glass of a skyscraper, femininity and female sexuality is reified through her “displayed” position as preservation and is further performative in a form of commodity (p. 118). Such
“supersexual” perfection and reification is mirroring the deadliness in social normalcy, in obsessive pursuit of a dualist view of sex/gender, especially in contemporary
American cultural context.
In the advertisement campaign of Dolce & Gabbana 2007 Cruise Collection, shot
20 Originally in “With Serious Intent” (April 1999), i-D, 185, p. 141.
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by photographer Steven Miesel (figures 27-1, 27-2 and 27-3), perfection of the social ideal of a dualist view of sex/gender on the surface serves as masquerade, and
disguises the deadliness of social normalcy within. With the nude American muscular male models such as Chad White and Clint Mauro as well as the well-groomed Hilary Ronda and Julia Stegner displayed in the window of the Dolce & Gabbana store in Milan, the scene appears to project a dualistic view of ideal gender. The perfect musculature of White and Mauro projects “ultimately sexiness and virility” in Edwards’s contention, and is dualistically linked to the almost impeccably curvy slender figure and smooth white skin of the female models, who project an ideal and mythic “White” femininity. At a glance, such dualism is seen as the perfect
contemporary ideal of “male musculature and female slim curviness” which restores the dominance of male virility in opposition to the subordination of female fragility.
However, the repertoire, with the implication of voyeurism of the scene, which is shot from outside a window, and the manikin-like female models implied by their wax or reflective pale skin, as if embalmed, at times reveals death to spectators. The whole set is complete and with the seemingly so virile and alive male models sandwiched in the window, it nonetheless echoes Evans’s “sampling” metaphor of “putting an exotic butterfly in the narrow space between the panes of glass” (p. 118). Overall, the campaign rather projects a parody on the social voyeurism and essentialist dualist sex/gender normalcy that with all its perfection from the outside can nonchalantly (or even intentionally) reveal its deadliness and symptom on the inside.
In contemporary context, symptoms such as “manorexia” emerge,21 while the
21 McVeigh’s observation is evidenced with opinion from a consultant psychiatrist, Dr. David Veale, as she seeks to link such body shapes with any pre-determined illness. There are statistics to indicate an increase of male sufferers of eating disorders: “For men, fat is no longer just a feminist issue, since the number of men suffering problems with food and body image is rising fast, with experts suggesting that 40% of binge eaters and a quarter of anorexia and bulimia sufferers are male – compared with 10% a decade ago – while the equivalent rates for women have not changed significantly” (McVeigh, 2010).
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life experience of anorectic males is used to show that high fashion is causing a negative influence as this shift in aesthetics of the male image will bring out “pressure to conform to a false ideal” (Richman, 2010, as cited in McVeigh, 2010). With
symptoms such as “the Adonis Complex” termed by Pope, Phillips & Olivardia
(2000), along with what McVeigh calls “manorexia” which includes a symptom on the other end, which is dubbed as “bigorexia,” or “body dysmorphia”, male sufferers are dissatisfied with their body shapes and “become ever more muscle-bound in their obsessive pursuit of the perfect six-pack [clearly-defined abs] body.” All the symptoms suggest that the ideal phallocentric masculinity, with the projection of omnipotence on the surface of the musculature, is itself deadly and self-destructive.
Such a symptom is the masqueraded message of memento mori behind “male vanity,”
like that of Gibson’s Gibson Girl22 who gazes at herself in vanity.
Then, judging from Evans’s citation from Beard, with all the unbeautiful, un-sexy and imperfect features and physiques of male models used in contemporary Parisian menswear, the look is rather a mirror of deadliness. In Kristeva’s (1982) argument of abject body and abjection, with all the abject body’s likeliness to corpses and the social rejection and aversion that it provoked, unmasking the more deadliness of social normalcy of phallocentric omnipotent and virile masculinity, seems like that of compulsory femininity in patriarchy.
In sum, I argue that even on the surface of celebration, contemporary European men’s fashion can also return to the repressed fear of death and the fragility of human beings, with all the implication of death through the surface of male models and their projected masculinities, whether in reduced or “perfect” silhouettes, and discloses
22 In existing studies of women’s fashion, the visual pleasure women may get from being looked at is usually still interpreted in terms of women’s anticipation of the male gaze and the female identification is still subjected to patriarchy.
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such fear and deadliness, masqueraded by the omnipotent masculinity in the phallocentric social norms of contemporary society.
D. Reaction: the social symptoms of Peter Pans
1. The abject body: Parisian Peter Pan’s reduced silhouette
Other than mocking the male models’ physique as “chicken-chested,
hollow-cheeked and undernourished”, American critic Johnson also acknowledges that such silhouette stands for “the current preference of male beauty” as “not fully evolved,” and his contention is further evidenced with his citation from Kelly Cutrone, who is the founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion branding and production
company, that the slim look in men’s fashion is customer-driven, that “it’s the consumer that’s doing this, and fashion is just responding. No one wants a beautiful woman or a beautiful man anymore” (as cited in Johnson, 2008).
Just in echo of the observations above, in January 2007, the slim, boyish and elegant Danish model Mathias Laurdisen (figure 28), ranks No. 1 at Models.com, and is also known as one of the “Top Icons Men” in June, 2009. His success perhaps marks the transition of orthodox masculinity in “Hedi-slimanization”, and responds to men’s fashion editor at Vogue Hommes International, Mauries’s (2009), prospect for a transition in male aesthetics and the rise of new male supermodels:
[M]anliness seems universally to have been reduced to a single element of proof, the smallest denominator, i.e., the celebration of the six-pack….I’m talking about those picture perfect abs worshipped as the absolute proof of
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true masculinity in the Western world . . . Perhaps we’ll have to wait until the shifting sands of fluctuating identity firm up . . ., going hand-in-hand with a redefinition of the female gaze. (Mauries, 2009, p. 132)
In addition, a bunch of slim male models on the rise such as the Austrian Freidl and the Russian used in Johnson’s journalism, Stas Svetlichnyy, as examples, (figure 29) as well as British male model Alexander Beck, who turns from a clerk who works at a frying fish bar to a Prada boy23 (figure 30), are largely everything but
all-American boys: while some are European, others are largely Latin American and Asian, such as the Argentine Dior boy Santiago Figueras and Asian-Canadian Paolo Roldan and some being of mixed race, such as the German-American Sebastian Sauvé who grew up in the UK (figures 31, 32 and 33). As a consequence, such a slim,
juvenile look, with the use of models of a diasporic, subcultural, or multinational background, started in Parisian contemporary menswear and not only marks a disengagement of mainstream culture in such dissatisfaction of the monochromatic West but also echoes the contention of Evans’s (2003) edge, marginality and even transition of modernism in contemporary European fashion.
It is therefore my main contention here to further elaborate Evans’s critique of modernity in fashion through the inquiry of what it means to be a modern subject to the identity of the male. And specifically, according to her critique of fashion’s ability to recreate identities that:
[f]ashion, with its affinity for transformation, can act out instability and loss but it can also, and equally, stake out the terrain of “becoming” – new social
23 Rhodri, P. (2011, March 17). Fish bar lad, 17, becomes Prada model. The Sun. Retrieved from:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3472677/Fish-bar-lad-17-becomes-Prada-model.html
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and sexual identities, masquerade and performativity. (Evans, 2003, p. 6)
Back in Bordo’s (1993) adoption of a Foucaultian view of power regimes and bodies in her symptomatic reading of disordered female bodies, her interpretation of feminine pathology is to underscore that women are in a “backlash” against feminism.
While feminism exposed the imbalance of power relations in gender, and its movement challenged males for autonomy in the professional area, it did not bring about real liberation as it promised. In the heyday of feminism, women are “liberated”
and autonomy is encouraged, as women now take control of themselves and their lives, while Western cultural codes of “femininity” remain as: ideal feminine beauty of delicacy, motherhood, provider of emotional support. Feminism, rather than providing empowerment, substituted it with a sense of powerlessness of being women.
My interest in Bordo’s disquieting reading of anorectic bodies is to highlight that in an American cultural context, the ideal of femininity colludes with its own
second-wave feminism. However, her interpretations on the anorectic bodies, whether for women or men, are dogmatic for simply viewing them as diseased and
furthermore abject bodies in social norms. Not only is such interpretation univocal for femininity or masculinity by preserving the social normalcy, her perspective is
inadequate for its American cultural context which oversees the “normal”
standardization of American aesthetics in the process of globalization, for instance, the all-American ideal of commercialized male phallic muscularity.
I would like to argue in this section that contemporary Parisian men’s fashion as well as its counterparts in Europe, instead of simply catering to the social valorization by simply “giving the consumers what they want”, rather projects the orthodox
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masculinity in transition with its complex imagery, and at times in a more symptomatic way. As Cutrone argues, in contemporary European men’s fashion
“[p]eople are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult” (as cited in Johnson, 2008). I therefore come up with the metaphor of the Peter Pan Syndrome24 as puer aeternus in contemporary symptomatic masculinity, which refers to the male who refuses to “grow up” and “be a man”, as one approach of viewing the metaphoric symptoms of contemporary “Peter Pans” projected in contemporary European men’s fashion as a social reaction to traditional masculine gender roles.
On the surface, the reactionary Peter Pans are marked with their slender silhouettes in countering the commercialized and socially valorized physique of all-American muscularity, or as termed by Bordo, the “phallic body” that serves as
“an enduring sex object within western culture” (1999, p. 180), and this is evidenced in Mears’s observation on the models’ otherness and un-sexiness:
Bookers stressed the difference between people who are ‘just hot,’ that is, sexually attractive, and people who are appropriate as models, though the precise qualities that distinguish one from the other could best be described as “something special” or “something else.” (Mears, 2010, p. 6)
As mentioned previously, the ideals of masculinity and femininity are in fact lethal with the perfect masquerade of “sexiness” in social valorization, and such projection can be viewed as obsessive symptoms of dualist gender normalcy; with the figures and looks that internally contradict the dualist binary of gender, the silhouettes
24 American Psychiatric Association has included Peter Pan Syndrome as mental disorder.
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of sexuality and even biology as symptomatic bodies in social rhetoric are equally mirroring the abjection of social normalcy and inquiring definitions of masculinity in the contemporary context of post-second-wave feminism25 on the very surface.
In a contemporary social context, with the “liberated” women who seem to dare claim their active sexuality and work roles, it would seem that masculinity now is in a crisis with challenges in society, yet not so much from consumerism, as Edwards suggests. When the seemingly non-sexual, non-phallic or even “anorectic” male
In a contemporary social context, with the “liberated” women who seem to dare claim their active sexuality and work roles, it would seem that masculinity now is in a crisis with challenges in society, yet not so much from consumerism, as Edwards suggests. When the seemingly non-sexual, non-phallic or even “anorectic” male