A recent article in the NY times by Guy Trebay documents the very thin male high-fashion models seen lately. A desirable 6-feet-tall model needs to be in the neighborhood of 150 pounds.
The explanation? Trebay offers the following. My comments are italicized.
Credit Hedi Slimane or blame him. 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.
Then a funny thing happened. The models were also downsized. Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt.
Comment: If Hedi had been designing for overweight men, it is doubtful that most others would start emulating him. If others followed his lead, it is because they found it appealing. The question is why?
Guy Trebay adds:
“The first thing I did when I moved to New York was immediately start going to the gym,” the designer John Bartlett said. That was in the long-ago 1980s. But the idea of bulking up now seems retro when musicians and taste arbiters like Devendra Banhart boast of having starved themselves in order to look good in clothes.
“The eye has changed,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Clothes now are tighter and tighter. Guys are younger and younger. Everyone is influenced by what Europe shows.” What Europe (which is to say influential designers like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Jil Sander) shows are men as tall as Tom Brady but who wear a size 38 suit.
“There are designers that lead the way,” said James Scully, a seasoned casting agent best known for the numerous modeling discoveries he made when he worked at Gucci under Tom Ford. “Everyone looks to Miuccia Prada 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.”
Comment: Blaming Miuccia Prada? A Designer will lead the way if she comes up with a standard most others find very appealing. Again, why would most be influenced by one or two individuals?
Guy Trebay then has this:
“I personally think that it’s the consumer that’s doing this, and fashion is just responding,” said Kelly Cutrone, the founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion branding and production company. “No one wants a beautiful woman or a beautiful man anymore.”
In terms of image, the current preference is for beauty that is not fully evolved. “People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult,” Ms. Cutrone said.
Comment: Ms. Cutrone should try to find out how many men would rather be skinny than muscular.
Guy Trebay spills it:
“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”
This was abundantly clear in the castings of models for New York shows by Duckie Brown, Thom Browne, Patrik Ervell, Robert Geller and Marc by Marc Jacobs, where models like Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm. Mr. Svetlichnyy’s top weight, he said last week, is about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.
“Designers like the skinny guy,” he said backstage last Friday at the Duckie Brown show. “It looks good in the clothes and that’s the main thing. That’s just the way it is now.”
Comment: So the obvious has been stated...“Designers like the skinny guy.”
Another quote from Trebay:
George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: “When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, ‘I’m 6-foot-1 and I’m calling from Kansas,’ I immediately ask, ‘What do you weigh?’ If they say 188 or 190, I know we can’t use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height.”
Their waists, like that of Mr. Svetlichnyy, measure 28 or 30 inches. They have, ideally, long necks, pencil thighs, narrow shoulders and chests no more than 35.5 inches in circumference, Mr. Brown said. “It’s client driven,” he added. “That’s just the size that blue-chip designers and high-end editorials want.”
Comment: More confirmation of the obvious. It is the designers in general.
So what happened? Homosexual fashion designers are trying to get their male models to look younger. Unlike female fashion models, many of whom approximate the looks of boys in their early adolescence, homosexual designers will find it very difficult to have male models generally resemble boys in their early adolescence, but they can certainly push the boundaries over time and have a large proportion of their male models look like boys in their late adolescence and some like boys in their mid-adolescence. And, homosexual designers like John Bartlett, quoted above, would pin the responsibility for the shift on anyone except themselves.
The age preferences of homosexual men vary, and many of them are interested in muscular adult men, but a gradual shift toward the use of thinner and thereby younger looking male models again shows that a large number of influential male homosexuals in the fashion industry have pederastic interests.
Some pictures from NY times:
Boy o boy, onlooker ahoy!
Look who we now employ.
We have our bundles of joy
and we hope you too enjoy
like this queer with his toy!
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