To the uninformed they look like the kind of nerdy boys that couldn't get the girl at the school disco, but after years of losing out to their beefy peers, the skinny male is having his day. As London Fashion Week kicks off this weekend, stick-thin men will be parading the catwalks promoting an ideal of male beauty that is a far cry from the bulked-up models of the Eighties and Nineties.
But as indie kids and fashionistas across the country squeeze themselves into the latest drainpipe jeans, fashion's move towards a male size zero has a more serious consequence: it heralds an era where men – like women – feel pressure to conform to a waif-like body image.
The masculine ideal has undergone a step change, putting pressure on young men to conform to a new body shape. The fashion expert and agent Johnathan Phang explained: "Suddenly, you've got lots of guys becoming models who never thought they could be; the sort of people who were normally considered weeds or nerdy-looking."
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ModelVanity.ORG January Gallery Features
Showing posts with label Dior Homme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dior Homme. Show all posts
Feb 9, 2008
London is invaded by size-zero models
Feb 7, 2008
The Skinny?
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.
Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris, where even those inured to the new look were flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of guys who looked chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished. Not altogether surprisingly, the trend has followed the fashion pack back to New York
Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? Little over a year ago, in Spain, designers were commanded to choose models based on a healthy body mass index; physicians were installed at Italian casting calls; Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, called a conference to ventilate the issue of unhealthy body imagery and eating disorders among models.
The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.
For full story click here
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.
Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris, where even those inured to the new look were flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of guys who looked chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished. Not altogether surprisingly, the trend has followed the fashion pack back to New York
Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? Little over a year ago, in Spain, designers were commanded to choose models based on a healthy body mass index; physicians were installed at Italian casting calls; Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, called a conference to ventilate the issue of unhealthy body imagery and eating disorders among models.
The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.
For full story click here
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