As Mory (2008) argues, during the period 1980-1990, the prominence of
“porno-chic” in Italian men’s fashion and American social context also marks the decline of Parisian fashion from its leading role and its exclusion from international markets. Yet, according to Evans (2003), it is rather in the late 1990s that Parisian fashion houses seek their inspiration through juvenile themes and the young designers from London and Antwerp, which nurtures the overall artistic milieu and creativity.
Such exclusion from international markets, however, contributes to creative works such as John Galliano’s “spectacular” design for Dior women’s wear. The most representative example of such a paradigm shift in masculinity is to be found in Paris, as the prestigious high fashion house Christian Dior cooperates with a new designer,
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Hedi Slimane, for the launch of its menswear, Dior Homme:
By the tail end of the last decade, the Christian Dior brand’s projection of masculinity had been largely shaped by designer Hedi Slimane, whose singular assault on menswear was accomplished through the rejuvenation of the brand’s DNA and visual identity following the launch in 2000 of a line of menswear, Dior Homme. (Rees-Roberts, 2011, p. 86)
In resonance with Rees-Roberts’s recognition of Dior Homme’s success, the American press, for instance, Eric Johnson writes in the New York Times in 2008 that such a trend of the skinny look has a lot to do with the key factor of the menswear of Dior Homme, launched in 2000:
The type of men Mr. Slimane promoted when he first came aboard at Dior Homme some years back (he has since left) were thin to the point of
resembling stick figures; the clothes he designed were correspondingly lean.
The effects of his designs on the men’s wear industry were radical and surprisingly persuasive. Within a couple of seasons, the sleekness of Dior Homme suits made everyone else’s designs look boxy and passé, and so designers everywhere started reducing their silhouettes. (Johnson, 2008)
In echo of what Johnson has recognized, the success of Dior Homme shifts the traditional muscular representation of New Man, and the slim look is widely echoed in European men’s fashion, as evidenced by the silhouette of male models hired by the fashion industry. According to Johnson, “[t]he models were also downsized . . .
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Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris”.
From the millennium, the looks of male models reciprocally shift the contemporary norm of male ideal beauty influenced by Dior Homme. And in correspondence with Johnson’s and Rees-Roberts’s contention, Freidl has also observed that the reduced silhouette of male models serves as the best attribute to dissociate the European high fashion from the monochromatic Western male representation.
Q: The fashion industry is very international. To what extent do national characteristics exist?
Freidl: The way of working is overall alike. In regards to model types, there are differences: in New York college types are by far booked more than in Milan or Paris. In contrast, you can hardly find "beach boys" in Paris. Here (in Europe) there's more interest for fashion than for physical features. (‘At 24’, 2009/2009, p. 6)
Entwistle (2002) also shows regularization of downsizing for male models. Two main features suggested in the above section are most distinctive in Entwistle’s definition of fashion models for us to differentiate them from the mainstream aesthetics. In her empirical study specifically on male fashion models’ looks in London, the significant shifted masculinity of male models and their bodies is observed. As Entwistle argues, slimness is considered important in European fashion that“[f]ashion models are, without exception, very slim, even skinny by everyday standard” (p. 60). Her observation is evidenced in statistic measurement:
The male fashion model’s body is a very standard one in terms of size and
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shape: the required height for most agencies is between 180 and 191 cm (5 ft 11 in. – 6 ft 3 in.) and the standard measurements are, usually: chest, 96-107cm (38-42 in.), and waist, 76-81 cm (30-32 in.). (Entwistle, 2002, p.
59)
According to George Brown, booking agent at Red Model Management, the models now “have, ideally, long necks, pencil thighs, narrow shoulders and chests no more than 35.5 inches in circumference” (as cited in Johnson, 2008). The Russian male model, Stas Svetlichnyy (figure 29), is selected by Johnson as the example of the new silhouette of male models, and his measurements are shown as 145 pounds, 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist. Even in the historical context of the intimacy of Italian fashion to American culture, brands which draw on “porno-chic” have also participated in the downsizing movement:
Even in Milan last month at shows like Dolce & Gabbana and Dsquared2, where the castings traditionally ran to beefcake types, the models were leaner and less muscled, more light-bodied. Just as tellingly, Dolce &
Gabbana’s lookbook for spring 2008 (a catalog of the complete collection) featured not the male models the label has traditionally favored — industry stars like Chad White and Tyson Ballou,13 who have movie star looks and porn star physiques — but men who look as if they have never seen the inside of a gym. (Johnson, 2008)
13White is an American model, known for his several semi-nude photos in D&G jewelry advertisement campaign. According to the ranking of Models.com, Ballou is an iconic American model from Texas.
He is also known as one of the iconic male models for D&G underwear and D&G Anthology perfume campaign.
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Casting agent James Scully, who worked at Gucci under Tom Ford, echoes the de-Americanization and the eminence of slim aesthetic in Italian men’s fashion of
“Hedi-Slimanization.”
Everyone looks to Miuccia Prada14 for the standard, the way they used to look at Hedi Slimane. Once the Hedi Slimanization got started, all anyone wanted to cast was the scrawny kid who looked like he got sand kicked in his face. The big, great looking models just stopped going to Europe. They knew they’d never get cast. (Scully, 2008, as cited in Johnson, 2008)
Furthermore, it is objective to observe such development (or evolution) with the downsizing of standardized sample size15 in Italian menswear. From the field of marketing strategy, Entwistle’s explanation of the contradiction between the looks of male models and the social valorization is the adoption of a homosexual aesthetic of male bodies into the mainstream:
The displayed male bodies since the 1980s are unlike previous male bodies—young, muscular, sexy, self-consciously narcissistic, and offered for the gaze of women and heterosexual men in the new men’s magazines and fashion magazines. This trend is significant because it suggests that the
14 Miuccia Prada is the current designer for Prada menswear.
15 Sample size refers to the size of ready-made samples for photo-shootings, fashion shows or representations. Samples are usually only made in one size, which can be seen as ideal for a particular kind of body shape. And according to Johnson’s citation from Long Nguyen of Flaunt magazine, the new silhouette is changing for newcomers that for starters who have the American ideal looks, “they knew that they would never fit into designers’ samples. When I started out in the magazine business in 1994, the sample size was an Italian 50 [suit sizing, equivalent to American 40 or L-XL]. That was an appropriate size for a normal 6-foot male, yet just six years later — coincidentally at about the time Mr.
Slimane left his job as the men’s wear designer at YSL for Dior Homme — the typical sample size had dwindled to 48 [equivalent to American 39, or M-L]. Now it is 46 [equivalent to American 38, or S-M]”
(as cited in Johnson, 2008).
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aesthetic appreciation and display of the male body, for a long time associated with gay men and black men, has extended into mainstream, commercial culture to include white, heterosexual men. (Entwistle, 2002, p.
57)
With the ubiquitously underpinned and musculature in the imagery of fashion, such as in the advertisement campaigns of American retailer, Abercrombie & Fitch Co., lookbooks and even the spectacle of their semi-nude male models happily lining up in display in front of their stores, the ideal of phallic muscularity as “buff 6-footer with six-pack abs” has now been adopted into the mainstream through
mass-reproduction in globalization, and has even spread the “male vanity” onto the Gods of Football calendars in Australia. Downsizing, therefore, can be seen as a strategy of differentiation in the European fashion industry from the rapid growth of American brands such Donna Karan and Calvin Klein during the 1990s, which coheres with Mory’s (2008) observation. Meanwhile, it can also be explained with cultural critique in American feminist Bordo’s observation, as the once “intrusive”
representation of Tom Ford’s “porno-chic” has now been “normalized,” both
culturally and bodily, while the origin of its images, as “alterity” of male nudity and porn, now no longer retains its potency of causing “topics” in the wider society. In this sense, Johnson’s ideal is clearly echoing Bordo’s reading of the muscular male body, and its “normalization” in American culture, as envisaged in her reading of shifted trajectory of Hollywood male representations.16
16 In the Male Body, Bordo (1999) has observed the emergence of male nudity in Hollywood mainstream movies. As this thesis is written in 2012, the box office hit Magic Mike (2012), which is based on the male stripping experience of American actor and model Channing Tatum, seems to resonate in Bordo’s observation and contention of “normalization.” It is also worth noting that before Tatum starts his acting career, he was known for his modeling work for D&G advertisement campaign.
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With all the sociological observations as evidence, my contention will, however, eschew influences from social conception and American biases in studies of
masculinities in fashion imagery, and therefore resort to cultural, infused with sociological, critical and art-historian methods of studying the imagery, in order to seek an approach which transcends a monochromatic Western view and a mere capitalist view of “new” strategies of marketing. As Mears argues, contemporary fashion industry now relies on close cooperation of art and commerce, and inbetween each end is numerous careers and professions that altogether achieve equilibrium:
These invisible players comprise a competitive world of high-stakes careers, and they calculate their steps according to two opposed logics: on the one hand, making money, and, on the other, creating art. (Mears, 2011, p. 9)
With these internal contradictory powers in the fashion industry, fashion imagery, as argued by Martin (1997), is two-faced in this balance between capitalism and art:
Fashion is a characteristic art in its deliberate, decisive equilibrium between integration and outrage. We all know fashion’s propensity to seduce us and to morph our social form. Fashion, as the archetypal art of consumption, proves itself essential and desirable only in the context and service of culture’s images for itself. (Martin, 1997, p. 310)
It is the main concern of this thesis that fashion now is no longer clearly in a class antagonism of dominance—subordination in classical Marxism for pure profit-making, that “fashion surpasses its objects and surrounds them with
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fashion-specific phenomena of communication and consumerist fulfillment” (p. 310).
And Martin exemplifies two designers who are based in Paris, Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Gaultier, as they “expressed both gentility and complaisance within the social order, but each has also risked avant-garde and outré possibilities in the medium. Conceivably, even an individual garment might offer itself as happy social incorporation and grating social annoyance” (p. 310), and continues to point out that in consumerist Milan menswear, a garment can still incorporate resistance as well, that “a work by Gianni Versace may suggest a parity between the common and uncommon in a single recent garment” (p. 310).
As a consequence, my main argument is that codes and signs of ideal masculinity in European men’s fashion, instead of hinging on an American normalized phallic masculinity and “male vanity”, rather turn to a marginality of male aesthetics. The perspective of masculinity in contemporary European men’s fashion, being at the edge or against the grain of normalcy in my thesis, can especially be evidenced in
Entwistle’s study, as she has made a distinctive observation on the male models represented by the agency in UK, Models 1, as the miniature of the mechanism of modeling in the fashion industry. She argues that the cultural conception and production of beauty is rather “internally valorized”:
The model’s body, his look, is the product of nature, although his ‘beauty’ is most definitely cultural, produced as “beautiful” by being chosen and values within the fashion modeling world. Modeling is an aesthetic practice
producing some bodies as “attractive” or “beautiful,” which is internally valorized within the modeling and fashion industries. (Entwistle, 2002, p.
60)
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And the most apparently changed characteristic of male bodies is their lack of correspondence of socially valorized male aesthetic:
The lack of correspondence between the male fashion model’s “beauty” and ideas of male beauty outside is evidenced by the negative reactions,
particularly from female students, to footage of male models in the seasonal runway shows which I have shown in class. (Entwistle, 2002, p. 60)
These “negative reactions” also serve as evidence that wider social aesthetics can no longer explain the contemporary look in Paris or London. Furthermore, Entwistle significantly marks the edgy or unconventional facial features of male fashion models.
Fashion models can sometimes look quite unusual, with large or exaggerated features, such as a large mouth or very strong jaw line, although it is essential that these features are ‘photogenic.’ The quite
distinctive bodily features required in male modeling make it something that only a very small minority are “naturally” predisposed to. (Entwistle, 2002, p. 60)
In resonance with Entwistle’s observation, Mears (2011) also argues that the
“beauty” largely depended upon the eye of the European fashion industry, rather than that of a wider social beholder with her own experience of fashion modeling, and that:
[t]hey struggle to explain that a look is a reference point, a theme, a feeling,
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an era, or even an ‘essence.’ A look is decidedly not the equivalent of beauty or sexual attractiveness. While bookers and clients talk about some looks as
“beautiful” and “gorgeous,” they are just as likely to value others they describe as “strange,” “grungy,” and “almost ugly.” (Mears, 2011, p. 6)
Whether the facial features of contemporary male models are viewed socially as
“strange,” “grungy,” or “almost ugly” in Mears’s work, or as “weird” and “quirky” in Entwistle’s, it is certain that their “unbeautiful” looks do not appeal to the “perfect, harmonious” aesthetics of the mathematically calculated proportion since the Renaissance period, but rather to a more exaggerated character, which suggests mutation to “something else”, such as a disproportionately large mouth, or with emphasized bone structures in Entwistle’s and Mears’s observation (p. 68; p. 2). The looks of Slimane’s “muses” can serve as further evidence, ranging from Americans Boyd Holbrook, and Randy Johnston17, to the elf-like Dane Adrian Bosch all of whom appear in slim, lengthened and androgynous physique (figures 18, 19 and 20). And the recent Dior boy in the Dior Homme18 Spring – Summer 2011 advertisement
campaign (figure 21), Danish male model Victor Nylander, is also a boyish figure with a rather large mouth. This study links Entwistle’s contention of “edgy” (p. 64) features of male models to Evans’s (2003) critique of modernity of contemporary fashion imagery, and argues that such internally valorized aesthetics of male models, favored in Parisian menswear display echoes of “disruption and instability” in contemporary fashion (p. 10).
In Evans’s contention, certain high fashion images are “marginal” and function
17 Johnston is known as the last Dior boy of Slimane’s before he leaves the brand, and has passed away.
18 The current designer for Dior Homme is Kris Van Assche, from Belgium.
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in high modernism with its “historicism.” She borrowed Walter Benjamin’s metaphor of history as a labyrinth, suggesting that fashion images, albeit a product of
post-industrial culture, in fact are “unhappy returns” of the humanism progressive linear historical view of culture and society:
Although there is no repetition without difference, nevertheless the conditions of post-industrial modernity are haunted by those of industrial modernity when fashion designers dip into the past for their motifs and themes. These traces of the past surface in the present like the return of the repressed. Fashion designers call up these ghosts of modernity and offer us a paradigm that is different from the historian’s paradigm, remixing
fragments of the past into something new and contemporary that will continue to resonate into the future. They illuminate how we live in the world today and what it means to be a modern subject. (Evans, 2003, p. 9)
I would like to amplify such marginality to Evans’s argument of instability and disruption of modernity in contemporary European fashion, as such aesthetics not only contrast the conventional American-valorized muscularity with its plurality, which is shown in Freidl’s observation, but also respond to the other/Other with its Modernist deviation. Such male beauty has now turned away from the normalized and univocal phallic homosexual aesthetics, and to a spectrum that inquires into the Western social conception of masculinity with its modernist manner.