"Impossibly Thin and Ridiculously Young..." OR "Fashion's Obsession with 'The Boy'"

One trend that will define this moment in men’s fashion is the celebration of ‘the boy’.

Five years ago Germaine Greer read the zeitgeist of growing preoccupation and wrote a book about this centuries-old fascination. We now live in a world where the desirable masculine image is not one of physical strength or robust sexuality, but fine-boned innocence and lily-white timidity. From the lost-boys of Prada to Jill Sander’s vacant, Scandinavian youth, to Clavin Klein’s ethereal adolescence, and on it goes: Kenzo, Dior, Lanvin: all perpetuating a sexuality owned but not understood by it’s mascot.

But why this current move towards a men’s ideal that is so child-like? Surely those who can afford these trends are professionals, most of which could be the fathers of – or maintaining a ‘father complex’ relationship with – the boys on the pages of the magazines. Why would a man desire to emulate the imagery of the boy? Has the gradual feminisation of men’s fashion – both clothes and cosmetics – and the rampant metrosexuality boom of the first half of this decade finally laid the way for men to experience what grown women have long-suffered in fashion advertising: the celebration of unattainable youth? In love, as it is sometimes said, ‘you always like what you lack’. The same can be said for the lusty world of fashion. For in this day and age where one can have everything, it’s usually at the expense of one’s youth – and innocence. Maybe that’s what’s being sold now, as sex, power, wealth and ‘luxury’ have already been packaged, sold, copied and reproduced on the High Street. Is it an exercise in the daring or new, this provocative sexualization of ‘the virgin’, or are we just being fed the darker desires of homocentric fashion world? And are gay consumers responding in the same way as heterosexuals? Is there then the added desire to have as to be? So much of this trend is coming out of London or Paris, where the thin and pallid look of the inner-city creative reigns supreme amongst stylists, designers and photographers. Maybe this is their chance to make fashion in their own image, not the ideals they have been brought up with, like those of (photographers) Weber and Avendon. If one was to make clothes for pale and skinny men, it’s much more aesthetically gratifying to show them on a pale and skinny sixteen year old. This trend does have its detractors. There has been an attempt made by some labels to stand apart from the flock: ‘the beard’ has made a seemingly subversive appearance in the advertising of Westwood, Rykiel Homme or Gianfranco Ferre. Dontalla Versace is presenting something very different in the dishevelled favourite of middle-aged women, Patrick Dempsy - though to what affect, is entirely unsure. And old-school image makers like Bruce Weber and Mario Testino cap the youth of their muse at an age old enough to at least maintain the illusion of sexual dominance. Is the new youth-quake ideal sexually regressive? Or, in light of the view of powerful masculinity that has pervaded our storytelling since the birth of the hero, is it a new beauty that challenges our previous notions of what a man should be? At the very least, for those who don’t enjoy it, like most things in fashion, it will be gone before too long.

*This article was a finalist in the British Vogue Young Writer's Competition