Exquisite Corpses
Why are male models pumped up, while their female counterparts are vanishing into thin air?By JOE GIOIA
Last week a Swiss watch company decided not to make a big deal about skinny women in British Vogue. Concerned that the depiction of gossamer-thin models was a potential health risk for anorexia-prone adolescent girls, the company had briefly pulled its ads. Upon reflection, though, the watchmakers decided that it was not their place to meddle so bluntly in editorial matters, and ultimately the whole affair merely ended up giving some Condé Nast fashion editors, who testified to the robust health of the models in question, the rare chance to appear sensible and fair-minded.The first thinning of the feminine ideal took place in the '20s, and skinny women have been used in fashion shoots since at least the Twiggy days 30 years ago. Even Kate Moss is old news by now. So it's hard to understand why such a fuss is being made right now. It is altogether fitting, however, that a Swiss watch company with the millenarian name Omega, an enterprise which so relies on principles of precision and dependability, should be made uncomfortable over the current state of the female form in the fashion press. One wonders if the brouhaha is less about health than about imprecise and upsetting sexual components.
We're talking about editorial pictures here -- those commissioned and executed by employees and contract artists of fashion magazines. Such pictures have a wider latitude for expression than regular apparel and accessories advertisements, which are generally safe havens of conservative department store culture. In fact, fashion magazines are a complicated nexus of conflicting social and commercial pressures, overseen by cadres of fiercely intelligent people who struggle to keep their pages safe for advertisers while conducting a neurotic campaign for the new. They are, in effect, style conspiracies whose aim is to reveal a measure of truth, an understanding of contemporary moods, with fantastic lies. Fashion photos are understood, if not demanded by the public, to be elaborate fantasies. As such, they portray a kind of psychological news that standard news photos couldn't possibly cover.
Until about 30 years ago, fashion pictures of women were not unlike fine watches -- cool and precise vessels of affluence and control (exhibit one: Avedon's photograph of Dovima and the elephants), their exquisitely crafted faces hinting at charming complexities within. With women's lib came a more visceral power, memorably portrayed in the '70s by Helmut Newton, whose visions of omni-sexual Amazons were collected in his aptly-titled book "Big Nudes." In the '80s, of course, women were supposed to have it all and an athletic maternalism, a kind of Darwinian fitness, reigned. It was not uncommon then to see babies as accessories, like strange Vuitton bags, for the model mom on the move.
So how is it that in this decade these once entrancing symbols of power and accomplishment have morphed into beacons of a kind of loss? Ironically, as male models have become steadily more buffed, evincing the kind of healthy, broad-shouldered homoeroticism Walt Whitman only dreamed about, women seem to have become de-natured, barely there -- resembling either winsome boys (Herr Mann to the Lido courtesy telephone, please) or angelic junkies: the ladies who (naked) lunch.
It is worth noting that, in fantasy land, the roles are never reversed and the twain never meet. You are no more likely to see a waif snuggling a barbell boy than you are to see a scrawny young man on the nod in an Armani suit. Indeed, while the pumped dudes are often pictured with equally pneumatic girlfriends, at least in those men's mags that aspire to safe hetero-sex, the skinny girls, though sometimes given a reedy poet or musician to hang with in Gen-X mags, are generally portrayed in the upmarket shoots for Vogue, W and Harper's Bazaar as being out of reach of reality, either solo or in the asexual, and rather repetitious, company of one another.
The British are renowned for their beautiful boys, so it should surprise no one that the best skinny models, Twiggy, Kate and the latest, Trish Goff, are all daughters of Albion. Factor in also the abiding, practically institutionalized, popularity of heroin in that green and pleasant land and visions of the beautiful junkie seem natural products of the English dream mill. Still, how did the figure gain such currency?
One would be hard put to find a better symbolic consumer than a junkie. The product vanishes every day, leaving behind a slightly enlarged need. (Talk about appealing to advertisers!) Themes of illness and consumption, once literal equivalents, have been co-equals in certain intellectual circles for decades and seem to have finally formed a caduceus around the wand of fashion. The viral elements found in the works of Mann, Camus and Burroughs have finally drifted down (just as Burroughs said they would, through sex and pictures) to everyday life.
So what can we infer from this Neverland of pumped guys and wasted dolls? A wishful fantasy for a historically out-of-shape and overweight public? That's too easy. An erotic dream of eternal health offered to a male community, both straight and gay, menaced by disease? That helps to explain the guys. But if the ideal male answer to sickness is a cartoonish vigor, one can infer, given the photographic evidence before us, that women are more comfortable with the notion of accepting the illness head on.
While it is tempting to see the waif/junkies as a symptom of the general social malaise, they can be seen, paradoxically, as offering a kind of redemption. If the buffed male images convey a fatuous denial of illness, the female ones represent an acceptance of the disease. By embracing it, routing its power through their bodies, they turn it, at some cost, into a kind of beauty.
Those Vogue editors are right. These girls are a lot stronger than they look.
Joe Gioia, former Camera Columnist for the New York Times, has written for Modern Photography and American Photo. He maintains his own web site of photo work. He can be reached at jag101a@winternet.com