Has anyone seen the Dior man? You know the one, that scrawny young rocker with a chicken chest, a size 36 suit and a face 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. On catwalks and in advertising campaigns the prevalent male image became that of a skinny skate-rat, a juvenile with pipe-cleaner proportions.
But that was when the economy was flush. Consumers were content then to indulge designer subversions of age and gender expectations, said Joe Levy, the editor in chief of Maxim magazine. When the recession lodged in the landscape, “suddenly the notion of having a job or a career is in doubt,” he 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 shaving blades. You grow up. Suddenly evidence of a new phase in the cycle of evolving masculine imagery was splashed across magazine covers and all over the catwalks in the runway season that recently ended.
“It’s not just models, it’s actors, it’s advertising, it’s the movies,” said Sam Shahid, an advertising creative director . “ Everyone’s suddenly jumping on it.”
“It’s also, like comfort food, about the economy,” he said. “ 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, who plays Don Draper in the hit television series “Mad Men.” That the square-jawed Don Draper 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 show’s success .
“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.”
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.
Even Prada and Louis Vuitton embraced the new imagery in the recent runway season, casting what Jason Kanner, the president of the men’s division of Major Model Management, termed masculine, manly men. “They look like throwbacks to the days of Herb Ritts,” he said.
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. When casting a recent fashion pictorial, the editors of Details magazine concluded that, in a depressed economy, the Details man was not well represented by the boys so fashionable a moment ago.
So they cast Gabriel Aubry, a blond Canadian who two years ago would have been thought of no longer viable in the business. “For us it was about how relatable this guy is to the reader,” Dan Peres, the magazine’s editor in chief, 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-yearold man who has washboard abs and who fathered Halle Berry’s kid.”
By GUY TREBAY
