10.15.10
HAS anyone seen the Dior man? You know the one, that scrawny rocker dude with a chicken chest, a size 36 suit and a face that seems to be sprouting its first crop of peach fuzz.
It has been almost a decade since Hedi Slimane, then the designer for Dior men’s wear, jump-started an aesthetic shift away from stiffly traditional male images that long dominated men’s fashion. Since then, season after season, designers, editors and photographers alike fell into unconscious lockstep with Mr. Slimane’s tastes in men. The image of the Dior man was so influential that it spawned a host of imitators and, not incidentally, exiled a generation of conventionally handsome and mature models from runways into the gulag of catalogs.
On catwalks and in advertising campaigns the prevalent male image has long been that of skinny skate-rat, a juvenile with pipe-cleaner proportions. Designers as unalike as Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada developed so pronounced an appetite for the jailbait type that at some model castings in Milan and Paris the new faces often showed up chaperoned by Mom.
“Men have always been defined by their jobs — always,” said Joe Levy, the editor in chief of Maxim. When the economy was flush, consumers were content to indulge designer subversions of age and gender expectations, he added. That was before the recession lodged in the landscape like an errant iceberg taking its own time to thaw. “Suddenly the notion of having a job or a career is in doubt,” Mr. Levy said. “So you fall back on old notions of what it meant to be a man or to look like one.”
You lose the T-shirt and the skateboard. You buy an interview suit and a package of Gillette Mach 3 blades. You grow up, in other words. Suddenly evidence of a new phase in the cycle of evolving masculine imagery was all over the catwalks in the runway season that recently ended. Just as suddenly it can be seen splashed across the covers of magazines, where the boys of recent memory have been transformed overnight into men.
“I was working on our new issue when I got to Paris,” Stephen Gan, the editor of the influential men’s-wear magazine V Man. Titled “The Coming of Age” issue, the new V Man features on its cover no skinny kid model but Josh Brolin who, with his weather-beaten face and crow’s-feet, looks every minute of 44.
“As soon as I got there, Carine handed me her new issue,” Mr. Gan added, referring to Carine Roitfeld, the taste-setting editor of French Vogue and Vogue Hommes International. The theme of her latest men’s-wear issue, whose cover features Matt Norklun, a star model of the ’80s, is titled, appropriately, “The Prime of Life.”
“It’s not just models, it’s actors, it’s advertising, it’s the movies,” said Sam Shahid, creative director of Shahid & Company and a force behind campaigns that first helped put Calvin Klein’s name on half the world’s backsides. “It’s trendy to do this, and everyone’s suddenly jumping on it,” Mr. Shahid said, referring to the abrupt rejiggering of masculine ideals.
“It’s also, like comfort food, about the economy,” he said. “Look back to movies during the Depression, and all you saw was real guys like James Cagney. In tough times, people want a strong man.”
Or, at the very least, they want images of men who look old enough to vote. “The twink thing seems over,” said Jim Nelson, the editor of GQ. “When people open GQ, I don’t want them to feel like they’re looking at clothes on 16-year-olds.”
It is not merely a matter of body type, Mr. Nelson noted. “When we cast, we want a model with some heft to him and a few years on him,” he said. “Someone who has aged a little bit and who feels like he’s a man.”
What they want, in short, is Jon Hamm. That Mr. Hamm’s square-jawed Don Draper so persuasively resembles an archetypal father on a time-travel visa from an era of postwar expansion and fixed gender roles can hardly be incidental to the success of “Mad Men.”
“At a time of underemployment and digitized labor that doesn’t have real products at the end of the process people want to be reminded” through images from pop culture, Mr. Nelson said, “that we as men do work, we do labor, we do still make things.” Half the story pitches the editors at GQ get nowadays, Mr. Nelson added, come from writers who want to go to butcher’s school.
Designers, for their part, alert to a burgeoning interest in the trappings of manual labor, have responded with a wholesale revival of so-called “heritage” labels and work wear. And they are casting their runway shows and ad campaigns with increasingly hirsute, well-built, mature types — men who certainly look as if they’ve never been waxed or had a manicure.
In an article in the new V Man titled “The World’s First Male Supermodel,” an interviewer remarks to the model Jeff Aquilon that early photographs of him by Bruce Weber prompted a thousand academic
reconsiderations of contemporary masculinity. Like any ordinary lug unaffected by his own godlike aspect, Mr. Aquilon responds with modesty. “People were laying a lot of money on the line,” when paying him fat sums to appear in his skivvies for ads of the era, he said. His ambitions then were simple, Real Man goals: stay in shape and show up on time.
“Maybe it’s that the stylists that were in power 10 years ago are not so powerful anymore,” Jason Kanner, the president of the men’s division of Major Model Management, said of the latest development in masculine ideals. “Maybe it’s that as consumers are getting older, they want to see something that reflects what they look like in the mirror.”
Any sane man, of course, would be ecstatic to see Mr. Aquilon’s features reflected when he gazed into the glass. Yet for a long time, Mr. Kanner said, models of that type were out of favor with a business that sought beauty instead in a goofy-looking androgynous version of Peter Pan. “I’m a big believer that classic beauty never dies,” Mr. Kanner added, although until recently his was a minority voice.
“For a long time it was just those skinny guys, those boyish Prada types,” he said, referring to men like Cole Mohr — a model with jug ears and the body of a teenager — long a favorite at labels like Prada and Louis Vuitton. “I hate to use the word waif, but what else can you call all these skinny young hairless guys?”
Even Prada and Louis Vuitton embraced the new imagery in the recent runway season, casting what Mr. Kanner termed “masculine, manly men” for their shows. “The guys now look like models again,” he said. “They look like throwbacks to the days of Herb Ritts.”
Is it entirely a coincidence that Mr. Ritts himself is enjoying a posthumous revival? A new volume from Rizzoli celebrates his work as a photographer and equally the Amazons and Olympians he memorialized in his career. The sort of ripe beauty Mr. Ritts tended to celebrate owed a great deal to the ideals of old Hollywood; lavish, irresistible and lush, it also held none of the dangers that irresistible male beauty would come to symbolize after the appearance of AIDS.
When casting a recent fashion pictorial, the editors of Details were aware that in seeking a “real man” type they were looking for a nonexistent ideal. There is of course no such thing as a “real” man, Dan Peres, the magazine’s editor in chief, remarked. “But we have a product to produce that, in the end, has to be relatable to a reader, a reader who wants to be able to see some vision of himself in the pages of a magazine.”
Especially in a depressed economy, the editors concluded, the Details man was not well represented by the boys so fashionable a moment ago.
So they cast Gabriel Aubry, a godlike blond Canadian who as recently as two years ago would have been thought of as washed-up in the business. “For us it was about how relatable this guy is to the reader,” Mr. Peres said. “It’s about what connection a reader is going to make with some waify 17-year-old versus a 34-year-old man, albeit a 34-year-old man who has washboard abs and who fathered Halle Berry’s kid.”
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