Consider the red-backed fairy wren. The males, one of nature’s dandies, have coal-black plumage, scarlet capes and wings with yellow trim. The females are gray-brown with just a bit of speckling. If a female flew by, you’d think: “wren.” If a male flew by, you’d think: “wow.”
Now consider New York Fashion Week, which I, an art critic by trade, spent two weeks doing, with spring-summer 2012 men’s wear as my assigned beat. As is often true in journalism, I was learning on the job. But as I puzzled over which male models were super, and why, and caught up on celebrities I’d never heard of, one thing seemed clear: When it came to men’s fashion, the fairy-wren paradigm didn’t hold.
Women got most of the scarlet and yellow, the capes, the trims, the pizzazz, as I could see by following the shows online. The general visual impression I took away from the men’s shows was of gray, beige and brown, a lot of that brown being tanned skin. Even when a designer tried to jazz things up — Tommy Hilfiger went sort of nuts with nautical stripes at his show, held at the High Line on the first Friday of Fashion Week — the men still looked dressed-down-drab.
Photo: Bloomberg
Has this traditionally been so? Or was this just the unschooled take of a fashion rookie? I turned for answers to the one place I knew to turn, art history. I pulled out my old H.W. Janson survey book. And as I started to flip through, I realized that maybe I wasn’t such a newcomer after all.
For years, I’d been looking at fashion in art. I just hadn’t called it that. I’d called it costuming, period detail, symbols — passing over the fact that the dresses and doublets I was seeing in Medieval manuscripts and on Renaissance sculptures were probably accurate depictions of real clothes that once covered real bodies and reflected the whims of real fashion taste.
Close to the beginning of Janson, I saw something startlingly familiar: the Parke & Ronen men’s swimwear show I’d attended a few nights earlier, but set in ancient Greece. What I was looking at were marble sculptures of kouri, or youths, from around 600 BC. They were all nude and all shared the same pose: standing upright, arms down, staring blankly ahead, with one foot slightly advanced, as if in forward stride.
The pose, as I now knew, was standard on runways. So was the body type. And the blank beauty. The Parke & Ronen men looked like generic career-hunks. The kouri did, too; so generic, in fact, that they seemed barely human.
They weren’t human. They were semi-divine.
Janson describes kouri as “neither gods nor mortals but as something in between, an ideal of physical perfection and vitality shared by mortal and immortal alike.” Don’t models occupy a similar position: below the designer-gods, but above the gazing, buzzing, picture-snapping public?
There are differences, of course. The nudity of the kouri had spiritual implications; the near-nudity of models in swim briefs sold retail. In fact, near-nudity turned out the most reliably eye-catching element in the men’s shows, though it was not without problems. You had to wonder, were we being asked to evaluate briefs or bums? By the time you figured out where your eyes were supposed to go, the show was over.
As I moved through the book, and through the week, I saw male fashion change. Instead of taking more off, men started putting more on. In a famous sixth century mosaic power-portrait, Justinian, emperor of Byzantium, looks almost architectural in his cloak of heavy silk and cloth-of-gold.
Nor is he alone in his magnificence. Male members of his court line up on either side, in a face-forward formation, like participants in a ritual. This, too, looked familiar. This is the way models and designers routinely line up to take a bow at the end of a show, in one of the many rituals that dictate the shape and pacing of Fashion Week, which, despite the flutter and buzz, felt like a very uptight, by-the-book affair, the way power rituals are.
The Michael Bastian show, held at a Midtown art gallery space, had a moment of diversion. A royal appearance! About halfway through, a model walked out who didn’t look like the others — older, different — and he was greeted with shouts and applause, the only time I heard that all week. I learned that he was Scott Barnhill, a supermodel of the 1990s, and by fashion standards a veteran. Obviously, for his longtime fans, he still rules. And since I was by that time feeling the impact of Fashion Week’s wall of newness, that was nice to see.
I say newness, but fashion, like most art, depends on recycled and rejiggered oldness for raw material. In fashion, this often takes the form of nostalgia, and that’s a drag. Retro? Bad idea, and there’s a lot of it in art right now. Maybe that’s why fashion, or at least men’s wear, felt so much like current art: timid and bland, if beautifully made.
Anyway, Bastian built his show around the image of James Dean, but apart from putting a few Dean-ish-looking models in Dean-ish outfits, he did nothing much with the idea that I could discover.
By contrast, the designer Daisuke Obana of N. Hoolywood did something interesting with another, broader period motif, early 1960s Alfred Hitchcockian film. He put his show on a stage, at Borough of Manhattan Community College in Lower Manhattan, rather than on a runway, which raised the possibility of turning a collection display into theater. And he cooked up a witty backdrop of changing vintage film credits with scrambled names. His skinny, nerdnik clothes, worn by glum curve-shouldered models in clunky shades, completed a carefully thought-through package.
I’m deeply skeptical of the fashion-as-art talk of recent years, which, judging by what’s been produced, has rarely advanced beyond opportunism on either side of the equation. And while calling Obana’s show “performance art” is too glib, the fact is, that within what to me are like fashion’s almost bizarrely rigid conventions, he came up with something imaginative. Maybe he’ll undertake more ambitious projects, not involving product placement, in the future. It’s pretty clear he could if he wanted to.
I was hoping for a total concept presentation from Steven Cox and Daniel Silver of Duckie Brown. The word was that their collection and show were inspired, in part, by working-class London street-gang culture. So they were on interesting political ground, and I wondered what they would make of it. Did I have old information about their theme? The result was tame. There were some hoodies, outsize, floppy. But mostly there were track suits and pants-and-shirt combinations, no frills, in purple, blue, charcoal and beige.
This utilitarian plainness reminded me of clothes designed by various Futurist and Constructivist artists in Italy and Russia in the early 20th century: boxy suits by Giacomo Balla; a straight-cut jacket by Vladimir Tatlin; a jumpsuit by Alexander Rodchenko. But conceptually there was a big difference between old and new.
The early 20th-century artists, high on utopian thinking, were creating anti-fashion fashion, with the aim of breaking the market’s planned-obsolescence flow. One of Balla’s suits, for example, had moveable parts that allowed the wearer to alter its design at will. You didn’t have to buy a suit. You rearranged the one you had.
Tatlin’s jacket was conceived as a kind of wearable micro-environment. It could be reshaped to keep you warm, keep you cool, attract breezes, etc. Rodchenko’s jumpsuit was a walking workshop and studio, fitted with pockets for all kinds of objects, and sturdy enough to last a lifetime.
The jumpsuit was also radically ugly. Even Rodchenko thought so. And that was a problem. If fashion was, as Oscar Wilde defined it, “a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months,” then the jumpsuit would only help to perpetuate fashion rather than end it.
But at least that couturial curiosity was radically something. None of the men’s wear I saw during Fashion Week was even remotely that. It was all was just OK: Hilfiger’s preppy ties, Bastian’s Pee-wee Herman suits; N. Hoolywood’s T-shirts with staring eyes. The only operative politics I could detect was Lookism: as in, this looks better than that, which doesn’t inspire large ideas.
Would new, more challenging sources of influence help? I’m randomly turning pages in Janson and seeing a forest of Piero della Francesca’s utterly fantastic towering 15th century sculptural hats; and Caravaggio’s street kids wrapped in bed sheets, playing angels and cupids, with roses behind their ears. Here’s a male portrait by Bronzino, and one by Van Dyck. And samurai armor. And a seductively delicate openwork male corset made by the Dinka people of Sudan. The point is, there is much more out there than camouflage prints and Happy Days reruns.
But don’t listen to me, an art-geek who wandered into a strange new world, about what men’s fashion should do. Fashion should turn to one of its own for guidance. It should ask itself: What would Oscar do?
Here’s what Oscar Wilde did: He wore a long bottle-green overcoat trimmed with fur. A sky-blue cravat of sailor style. A morning suit of light mastic-colored tweed. A moonlight-green tie. A cobweb-colored velveteen coat. A mouse-colored corduroy blouse with gray worsted pantaloons. Lace cuffs. A top hat, and a boutonniere of heliotropes, daisies and a tuberose.
He wore some of these items together, sometimes with different but equally clamorous, glamorous things. And he wore them when he visited the US, whose citizens he found to be profoundly — irredeemably? — fashion-challenged, particularly the men, “shorn and respectable drones.” People thought he was crazy. People thought he was rude. But nobody didn’t look at him. He was the cock of the walk, and hot news.
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