Is Skinny The New Jacked ?

[oreogasm]

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 pass", 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.

"Skinny, skinny, skinny," said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. "Everybody's shrinking themselves."

This was abundantly clear in the castings of models for New York shows by Duckie Brown, Thom Browne, Patrik Ervell, Robert Geller and Marc by Marc Jacobs, where models like Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm. Mr. Svetlichnyy's top weight, he said last week, is about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.

"Designers like the skinny guy," he said backstage last Friday at the Duckie Brown show. "It looks good in the clothes and that's the main thing. That's just the way it is now."

Even in Milan last month at shows like Dolce & Gabbana and Dsquared, where the castings traditionally ran to beefcake types, the models were leaner and less muscled, more light-bodied. Just as tellingly, Dolce & Gabbana's look-book for spring 2008 (a catalog of the complete collection) featured not the male models the label has traditionally favored industry stars like Chad White and Tyson Ballou, who have movie star looks and porn star physiques but men who look as if they have never seen the inside of a gym.

"The look is different from when I started in the business eight years ago," Mr. Ballou said last week during a photo shoot at the Milk Studios in lower Manhattan. In many of the model castings, which tend to be dominated by a handful of people, the body style that now dominates is the one Charles Atlas made a career out of trying to improve.

"The first thing I did when I moved to New York was immediately start going to the gym," the designer John Bartlett said. That was in the long-ago 1980s. But the idea of bulking up now seems retro when musicians and taste arbiters like Devendra Banhart boast of having starved themselves in order to look good in clothes.

"The eye has changed," Mr. Bartlett said. "Clothes now are tighter and tighter. Guys are younger and younger. Everyone is influenced by what Europe shows."

What Europe (which is to say influential designers like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Jil Sander) shows are men as tall as Tom Brady but who wear a size 38 suit.

"There are designers that lead the way," said James Scully, a seasoned casting agent best known for the numerous modeling discoveries he made when he worked at Gucci under Tom Ford. "Everyone looks to Miuccia Prada for the standard the way they used to look at Hedi Slimane. Once the Hedi Slimanization got started, all anyone wanted to cast was the scrawny kid who looked like he got sand kicked in his face. The big, great looking models just stopped going to Europe. They knew they'd never get cast."

For starters, they knew that they would never fit into designers' samples. "When I started out in the magazine business in 1994, the sample size was an Italian 50," said Long Nguyen of Flaunt magazine, referring to a size equivalent to a snug 40-regular.

"That was an appropriate size for a normal 6-foot male," Mr. Nguyen said. Yet just six years later coincidentally at about the time Mr. Slimane left his job as the men's wear designer at YSL for Dior Homme , the typical sample size had dwindled to 48. Now it is 46.

"At that point you might as well save money and just go over to the boy's department," Mr. Nguyen said from his seat in the front row of the Benjamin Cho show, which was jammed as usual with a selection of reedy boys in Buffalo plaid jackets and stovepipe jeans, the same types that fill Brooklyn clubs like Sugarland. "I'm not really sure if designers are making clothes smaller or if people are smaller now," Mr Nguyen said.

According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans are taller and much heavier today than 40 years ago. The report, released in 2002, showed that the average height of adult American men has increased to 5-9 , in 2002 from just over 5-8 in 1960. The average weight of the same adult man had risen dramatically, to 191 pounds from 166.3.

Nowadays a model that weighed in at 191 pounds, no matter how handsome, would be turned away from most agencies or else sent to a fat farm.

Far from inspiring a spate of industry breast-beating, as occurred after the international news media got hold of the deaths of two young female models who died from eating disorders, the trend favoring very skinny male models has been accepted as a matter or course.

"I personally think that it's the consumer that's doing this, and fashion is just responding," said Kelly Cutrone, the founder of People's Revolution, a fashion branding and production company. "No one wants a beautiful women or a beautiful man anymore."

In terms of image, the current preference is for beauty that is not fully evolved. "People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult," Ms. Cutrone said.

George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: "When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, "I'm 6-foot-1 and I'm calling from Kansas," I immediately ask, "What do you weigh?" If they say 188 or 190, I know we can't use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height."

Their waists, like that of Mr. Svetlichnyy, measure 28 or 30 inches. They have, ideally, long necks, pencil thighs, narrow shoulders and chests no more than 35.5 inches in circumference, Mr. Brown said. "It's client driven," he added. "That's just the size that blue-chip designers and high-end editorials want."

For Patrik Ervell's show on Saturday, the casting brief called for new faces and men whose bodies were suited to a scarecrow silhouette. "We had to measure their thighs," Mr. Brown said.

For models like Demi'n Tkach, a 26-year-old Argentine who was recently discovered by the photographer Bruce Weber, the tightening tape measure may cut off a career.

Mr. Tkach said that when he came here from Mexico, where he had been working: "My agency asked me to lose some muscle. I lost a little bit to help them, because I understand the designers are not looking for a male image anymore. They're looking for some kind of androgyne."


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/07/fa...in&oref=slogin

[BAMF_T]

colin ?
clifs?

[siamesedream]

colin ?
clifs?

it's cool now for both genders to have vaginas.

[anonymous]

yeah i read that

[Patrice_Lumumba]

I came (no homo)

[bttrthnb4]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO dangit. I'm never gonna win

[esCO-]

yes it is but im gonna get jacked no matter what any1 says its hard on these streets ya dig

[Polack42]

if skinny was the new jacked then every1 at the gym would admire me.

[bizmark007]

only teenage girls like skinny metros

REAL women want a man with mass (no fatass)

[rsjrv99]

**** someone find me an article on how to lose burn muscle off

[mxer311]

Is ****ty posture the new hotness too?

[againstall0dds]

this is ridiculous.

its like is stupid the new smart? is poor the new rich? is ugly the new beautiful?

[Rodzilla]

**** someone find me an article on how to lose burn muscle off

fasted cardio...go!

[injured44]

damn that guy makes brad pitt in fight club look like jay cutler

models should be someone with a daniel craig physique you know something that looks human LOL

[Polack42]

only teenage girls like skinny metros

REAL women want a man with mass (no fatass)

...and u would kno about REAL women...

[callum-2006]

only teenage girls like skinny metros

REAL women want a man with mass (no fatass)

I agree, hardly any of the girls in my school are interested in me as far as I am aware and yet I have about 5 teachers who hit on me or go all shy when I talk to them... ???

I'd rather be ****in jacked than skinny though.

[esCO-]

I agree, hardly any of the girls in my school are interested in me as far as I am aware and yet I have about 5 teachers who hit on me or go all shy when I talk to them... ???

ROFL

[DaCougarMech]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis

it's sexy to have the consumption

[user87459310247]

Wow, wtf. 35.5" chest? ****, I didn't even have that when I was an pencil necked 141lbs. LOL!

[Polack42]

I agree, hardly any of the girls in my school are interested in me as far as I am aware and yet I have about 5 teachers who hit on me or go all shy when I talk to them... ???

I'd rather be ****in jacked than skinny though.

idk wat school ur going to. in our school... girls dont like skinny lil bitches. the guys that work out get all the poon

*EDIT* BTW... maybe ur teachers are just scared of u kuz ur so big that they dont wanna get u mad.

[bttrthnb4]

only teenage girls like skinny metros

REAL women want a man with mass (no fatass)

There's someone for everyone....but I prefer my husband who isn't a bag of sticks

[DaCougarMech]

idk wat ur school ur going to. in our school... girls dont like skinny lil bitches. the guys that work out get all the poon

he's right though

hs girls love the skinny emo build

[luckyclover]

Bah people with bad posture annoy me.

[Polack42]

no. they dont like emo's kuz of their build. they love emo's kuz they could share the same jeans with them. thats a whole differant topic

[Polack42]

Bah people with bad posture annoy me.

me too. i have bad posture, and its really annoying. i try to fix myself, but its just too hard. i gotta go to a chiropractor or sumthing. at least u look at other people and get annyed. i have to look at myself and get annoyed.

[Aries21]

models get more 'real women' ass than anyone here

[luckyclover]

me too. i have bad posture, and its really annoying. i try to fix myself, but its just too hard. i gotta go to a chiropractor or sumthing. at least u look at other people and get annyed. i have to look at myself and get annoyed.

Ouch thats harsh, but im sure there are things you could do to improve it with out having to go to the dr. I have no idea what those things would be but you can try searching online perhaps.

[Sparks]

only teenage girls like skinny metros

REAL women want a man with mass (no fatass)

i swear, in EVERY single thread about girls liking skinny or lean guys, someone ALWAYS pops out this dumbass quote. what the ****, REAL women? as opposed to fake women? you meatheads need to stop pulling **** out of your ass when you find out a female isn't as obsessed with muscle mass as you are, some women don't give a **** how muscular you are, it doesn't make them any more or less "real". Also, looking at your avatar, i question on what basis you make this statement to begin with.

[luckyclover]

models get more 'real women' ass than anyone here

Burger King and other fast food places sell more food then anyone else, doesnt make them good in the least. I would take big and less "ass" then super skinny and more "ass" any day.

[eddie_D]

I like where this thread is going. Many hs and now some college like the skinny ****s.