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October 18th, 2010
“What they want, in short, is Jon Hamm.”
The boy is dead again. This time it’s the New York Times which eulogises and pulls the referential threads.
Naturally, it’s the economic downturn. We long for real men with jobs, a grown up look which is parallel to a more mature style in female fashion. Editors from Maxim to V Man and Details comment and all agree that their readers no longer accept a 17 year old boy as an ideal. They want to look at someone they can identify with.
People have been trying to kill off the boy for a long time now. Tom Ford launched the new Yves Saint Laurent men’s fragrance M7 as early as 2002 with the help of a bit of hairy nudity, declaring that time was ripe for a new masculinity. Since then, there’s been recurring talk about the ideal moving in a more masculine direction, but in the end, the boy has always been victorious.
This time I’m not so sure, if only for the simple fact that there is a similar trend in the move towards more traditionally feminine bodies. There is a shift away from androgynous bodies to more distinct genders, something which might partially explain our love affair with the TV show Mad Men. There is safety in simplicity and rules.
It is tempting to stop there, to say that economically unsafe times make men (and women) want to return to male and female stereotypes. Grow a beard, have boobs, be muscly or curvy, become a stud or objectify themselves.
But that explanation seems too superficial, because there is a difference between the more mature female ideal and the grown up man. There has never been a male Lolita as an ideal for straight men (Tadzio in Death in Venice has never had that pull). The expected ideals are the mature man and the young girl and a more grown up feminine ideal is therefore a welcome change of familiar patterns, an example of how fashion can be progressive and enable women to release themselves from history’s old ‘get rid off after 40′ attitude.
What is interesting with the New York Times article is that the magazines whose editors agree on the new era of real men have very different readers. Maxim is a typical men’s magazine with semi-nude women while Details and V Man to a large extent are read by gay men. That they all move in the same direction says something.
At the same time they are talking about different male ideals. The Jon Hamm ideal is traditionally masculine, hairy, not too gym built, while mentioning Herb Ritts takes you in the direction of a more muscular, hairless and groomed Adonis ideal which we recognise from the 1980s and which mainly is a gay ideal.
Maybe this is the point. The obsession with true masculinity is something shared between straight and gay men. Read Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge and see that even when that book came out in 1968 people talked about there not being any real men anymore.
Isn’t this really just the usual fear for a masculinity without focus that we have talked about ever since Susan Faludi wrote Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man? What are men supposed to do in this new world without manual labour, where it is important to talk about your feelings, where men are expected to be equal but loses in sex appeal when they are? The financial crisis only enhances this feeling since it is mainly traditional male jobs that are disappearing.
Fashion is at it’s best in situations like this. It becomes an arena to explore and examine ideas. What is still interesting with that old wrinkly, windburned masculinity? What is the strong body about in a world where few are involved in manual labour? To what extent should the male body be objectified? Is manliness today more of an aesthetic than a lifestyle?
Perhaps manliness can’t be anything but aesthetics today? All that which kept the lifestyle going – the jobs, the spare time hobbies (which men don’t have time for now that they are expected to be more involved in family life), the separation of the genders – have been pushed away, become unmodern and obsolete.
If we want to be positive we could speculate that this is a disconnecting of the traditional masculinity from it’s bad sides like misogyny and homophobia. There is still a strong visual connection between rough manliness and murky values.
It is possible that men are tired of having to dress in a way that signals to women that they are for equality. They believe they are equal. They think they have earned the right to dress in whatever way they want. If women can’t see that they don’t care too much, because men are becoming like women: these days, they dress mostly to impress other men.
2
September 29th, 2010
So it was a pair of banana earrings we were craving?
The thing with blogging is that you can do or say pretty much what you want. And before you yawn and say you’ve heard it all before I just want to say that I mean that this blog will just be a place for me to vent or to inspire, to ponder fashion or just post a quick youtube clip. In time that might change, but for me it usually works best when I let blogging be as free and fun as possible.
That said, I’ve been watching the Milan collections on the internet like most people, I’ve been reading reports, and from this faraway perspective it really does feel like an exceptionally strong season. Milan’s weakness usually is that they seem to get the same memo and the week can therefore become a bit repetitive. This time it was a strength.
It seems so as Milan more or less killed off minimalism with their orgy of colours and patterns. It’s easy to make fun of a message which can be distilled as ‘COLOUR! FUN! PIZZAZZ!’ but maybe we’re just bored with try-hard fashion. Somehow anti fashion seems passé for the moment. I felt that Milan spoke about fashions renewed belief in itself. Fashion doesn’t have to be something else – fashion is enough in itself. There is a way forward in the clash between couture and street, as proposed by Raf Simons at Jil Sander.
Naturally this season will become ‘colour is back!’ after it gets the fashion mag treatment, but colour isn’t just a superficial message. In Washington Post, Robin Givhan wrote that ‘Designers have challenged people to shake off their greatest fear – the fear of standing out.’ Isn’t that exactly what fashion should be doing?
But what intrigues me the most is the optimistic message. Why now? Is it because we feel a yearning for it? It strikes me as telling that the newly elected leader of the Labour party here in Britain wants to paint Labour as the party of optimism. Does this new optimism signal a shift in values, a new way forward for the left? The left has sounded like whinos and fear-mongers for a long time, while the right have been talking about how globalism and capitalism is transforming the world into a much better place, pointing to how China have lifted millions out of poverty. But the worldview of the right have run into serious trouble after the financial crisis. Possibly this unfettered belief in capitalism doesn’t ring true anymore and a so the position of optimists is again possible for the left.
Could it be that it is this feeling that fashion’s new optimism picks up on? Am I taking it too far? I don’t know, but what I do believe is that fashion is a place where cultural currents and ideas are being expressed, so why not this one?
1
September 14th, 2010
Ridiculous or real?
If you are reading this, chances are you have already heard of Tom Ford’s return to women’s wear, this despite seeing any pictures, despite no bloggers or celebrities present and with a guest list of only 100 invited editors and fashion heavy-weights. You also know the return was triumphant. You might also know that the clothes were shown on a variety of women, some of them models, some superstars, some officially acknowledged stylish women. The clothes and models were all “individual” according to the impressed 100.
Granted that few designers could pull off a similar show, it must be said that if Tom Ford wanted to create buzz around his brand, he couldn’t have chosen a better method. In this day and age when people can see the first shots of a show uploaded from Blackberrys and iPhones within minutes, true exclusivity is rare to come by. We all want to see what the fantastic women, such as Lauren Hutton, Beyoncé and Julianne Moore looked like in their Tom Fords, but this time we will have to wait until December, when Terry Richardson’s snaps will be posted to the Tom Ford website, thereby solving the fashion industry’s dilemma of creating demand for clothes which won’t be in the stores for another couple of months in a time when everyone are accustomed to instant gratification.
Does Tom Ford’s presentation point forwards or backwards? Is this regained exclusivity a hint of what the coming decade will be like in fashion?
It could well be so in some respects, for example in the way of how modern commentators felt it was to show the clothes on a smorgasbord of women (sorry for the misogynistic image) who as one stated “could afford the clothes” instead of a trail of young teenagers without any real life experience. This apparently seems sympathetic to many in fashion, but does fashion really belong to them anymore?
This is ultimately an indication that there seems to be a longing for something authentic and real in fashion at the moment, whether it means models with “real” bodies, models who reflect the diversity of the real world, or just the effortless chic of the celinificated daywear assault.
Which is why we must also talk about Lady Gaga and her ilk. This week the Gaga was attacked and destroyed by the cultural critic Camille Paglia in the Sunday Times – Paglia, who for those who can’t remember, was one of the first to hail Madonna as a new icon for feminism – but resonded by wearing a meat dress to the VMA’s. At the same time the man behind her look, Nicola Formichetti, was appointed creative director of Thierry Mugler, the mother of all spectacularity.
Lady Gaga is not only a phenomenon, she is the biggest superstar to emerge since Madonna, and her ascent signals a completely different trajectory for modern pop culture and fashion: One of inauthenticity, of ridiculous outfits, of fashion for fashion’s sake, of 80s excess sifted through the 2010s. Could this be the way forward.
I’ve always felt the inauthenticity is important in fashion, but this is a trend which this time around started in London clubs such as Kashpoint in the early 2000s. It’s getting old, isn’t it? So I have a feeling we are moving away from the inauthentic and that in retrospect we will realise that the endpoint of the Noughties fascination with dressing up and being outrageous was a meat dress. There will obviously always be room for craziness and glamour, I just think that electroclash is over now.