In contrast to Edwards’ recognition of male figures and physiques in the
representations in men’s fashion as stereotypes of phallocentric defense, this study is aligned with Craik’s (1994) argument that within the contemporary consumerism popular culture and fashion industry create representations of male bodies in response to the social context:
Throughout the 1980s, media and popular culture have anticipated the emergence of the rejuvenated peacock, a man who is aware of his body not just as a machine but an object of sexual attraction enhanced by his choice of clothes. (Craik, 1994, p. 199)
Furthermore, this study argues that the imagery of “sexualized” body is representation that challenges the social or stereotypical masculinity in the form of male anxiety. I begin by reflecting on the work of the American feminist Bordo, who has been studying the male cultural bodies and their masculinities and continues to deconstruct the false consciousness in Western society, challenging patriarchy with her reading of imageries of male bodies, especially the fashion representations in The Male Body (1999).
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I begin by analyzing Bordo’s “second choice of male pin-up of the decade,”3 the underwear advertisement campaign of Gucci in 1998 photographed by Mario Testino and performed by French male model Renaud Tison (figures 1-1, 1-2 and 1-3). Being a female and a feminist, Bordo celebrates bare male body in men’s fashion. She comments on Renaud’s full-back nudity this way: “his bottom . . . is gorgeously, completely naked—a motif so new to mainstream advertising (but since then catching on rapidly) . . .” (1999, p. 197). Bordo’s comment on the male body in fashion
representations is a celebration of its presence in public, against the long-kept invisible tradition in the mechanism of concealment.
I wish to link Bordo’s logic to Mulvey’s argument of “world of sexual imbalance”
mentioned in the previous chapter, and focus on the male privileged activity of
“looking.” Compared with the ubiquity of female nudity in consumer culture, a man’s body is new to be an object for female spectatorship. In Bordo’s defense of the nudity in men’s fashion, she attacks the sexist tautology rhetoric such as Ashbery’s claim that
“male nude is not a nude,” that is, a man in nudity simply looks “undressed,” as opposed to female nudity, which is culturally legitimized as being “natural” (1999, p.
179). Bordo’s criticism of Ashbery not only echoes Chandler’s (2000) recognition of Western cultural sexist bias in viewing bodies with sexist in/difference, but also can be seen as a counter-reaction against sexism with her analogy of sexism to racism by substituting “female” to “white”, and “male” to “black”. Ryle (2011) has made a similar argument regarding power relations in gender, as she argues that within the male gaze, “[t]o look at and judge someone’s appearance is active, and therefore masculine . . . [T]o be the object of that gaze and judgment is passive and therefore
3 Bordo’s first choice in her widely-circulated chapter of beauty (re)discovers the male body, is American model Michael Bergin’s performance for Calvin Klein, photographed by Bruce Webber (figure 7-1 and 7-2).
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feminine” (p. 290). Both Bordo and Ryle emphasize on the presence of male bodies in fashion imageries as a “right to appear,” as opposed to the logic of concealment in phallocentrism and patriarchy, and in contrast to female’s to-be-looked-at-ness as subordination to patriarchal power regimes.
Behind Bordo’s celebration of the coherent male musculature in both
advertisement campaigns of Gucci and Calvin Klein is the grain of the Italian fashion industry on the soil of America. Both White (2000) and Steele (2003) have stated the historical, economic, and political influence of Italian fashion in American culture (as cited in Huober, 2010): After World War II the United States has been involved with the Italian reconstruction, in particular with its textile industry. In return, the
high-quality and innovative Italian textile industry is highly acclaimed by American industry and further is imported to help development the American fashion industry.
Therefore, the presence of Italian fashion connotes the close collaboration of the two countries.
To sum up the influence of Italian fashion industry in America, Huober (2010) has attributed the success of Italian fashion in America to three factors:
(1) the Italians’ successful marketing to department stores and fashion magazines; (2) the Italian love for Hollywood cinema; and (3) the close match between the wants of the Italian consumer and those of the American, as the Italian fashion industry heavily promotes its products in the United States. (Huober, 2010, pp. 2-3)
The three factors summed up by Huober have also been noted by critics in the Anglophone world, such as Bordo, Craik, and Edwards, who draw on advertisements
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of Italian fashion brands such as Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani or Gucci as
examples of Western men’s fashion. However, the emergence of Italian fashion is not merely a successful marketing strategy promoting “Italians do it better” in America;
within the strategy is an exquisite gender politics in response to a shift in Western society.
According to Huober’s reference, Welters and Cunningham (2005) argues that the collaboration in fashion industry between America and Italy also resonates with the second-wave feminism in America, and Italian designers often create female images in the rhetoric of sexual liberation, self-expression, working right, and freedom from discrimination. According to Ferré and Mazza (1998), Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré once remarked: “[w]omen today can live and make decisions independently, following their own choices. In some way, they adapt fashion to their own needs” (as cited in Huober, 2010, p. 5).
Judging from the supportive and affirmative attitude of Italian fashion industry toward second wave feminism, even in a form of commodity, the fashion industry is responding to social dynamics. Therefore, Edwards’ conception of fashion imagery as a service made to consumption proves to be a cultural bias in line with classical Marxism, and the contention of consumption as oppression is somehow overlooking the social dynamics of fashion industry in collaboration with feminism against patriarchy.
Thus, Bordo’s celebratory rhetoric of the muscular male bodies in men’s fashion may be seen as a signal of sexual liberation of women in second-wave feminism: the female spectator not only claims her right to see through a dominating gaze, but also recognizes her impulse as sexually active.
While the appearance of male bodies may be seen as a revolutionary reversal of
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gender power relations and the success of second wave feminism, I would like to draw on Mort’s perspective from a more marginal stance against the social norms. In his recognition of Foucaultian power of compulsory heterosexism, such power is working its mechanism of construction through its own “policing” interpretation of new masculinities over other readings and interpretations. According to Mort, “[such]
dissident reading was strenuously denied in more mainstream areas of popular taste, especially in the tabloid press” (1996, p. 16).
Being a mainstream press, The Sun amplifies its character of “gatekeeper” for social norms: “[f]orever on the look-out both to incite sex, and to police the perverse”
(Mort, 1996, p. 16). The Sun interprets the New Man in “rhetoric of normative, but liberated, heterosexuality” as “page seven guys” with the sexualized male bodies in competition with famous female pin-up figures, “page three girls” (p. 16).
Such culture conception of heterosexuality through mainstream media press during the 1980s – 1990s can largely be summed by Mort’s contention: “[t]he paper announced that the new visual erotica of men’s bodies was available for the
enjoyment of modern, fun-loving young women” (p .17). However, the cultural conception of masculinity has yet to include that of the queer, homosexual or transsexual.
By the end of twentieth century, as Rohlinger (2002) points out, in the social context of gay movement in America these representations are pronounced to appeal to heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual men, as a marketing strategy. In coherence, Bordo also terms such strategy as “dual marketing approach” (1999, p. 182). She contends that such images may have to do with the consumption habits of homosexual men. Consumer culture in the West not only emancipates female by encouraging the subject to look, but also emancipates the once invisible male body by re-constructing
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masculinity, albeit constantly in negotiation with the normalcy of compulsory heterosexism and patriarchy.