Let’s Hear It for the Boys: Menswear’s 10 Greatest Runway Moments Inline
Photo: Courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier1/10Jean Paul Gaultier’s Sex Objects, 1983
Way back in the early ’80s, menswear was a very different kettle of fish: After the psychedelia of the ’60s and the unisex experimentation of the ’70s, menswear had lost its moxie. Enter Jean Paul Gaultier, who decided to set menswear back on a preened and powdered pedestal. His first own-label menswear show, staged in 1983, was titled L’Homme Objet—The Male Object—and his models slinked down the runway in cutaway Breton-striped sweaters. They didn’t sport the famous skirt for men (introduced a year later), nor his later corsets and high heels, but nevertheless, Gaultier’s willful transgression of accepted gender norms—as simple back then as men as sex objects for women, rather than the other way ’round—caused a furor in an era otherwise dominated by the emergence of the power-suited yuppie. “There is something in what he does which . . . I don’t think it was ever touched on again,” says Jonathan Anderson, fan of a fellow in a frilly skirt himself. “The idea that you can get away with murder and it could become attractive.” We know who inspires J.Dub’s own eyebrow-raising fashion, then. (Anderson’s show, incidentally, is this Sunday.)
Photo: Courtesy of John Galliano2/10The Incroyable John Galliano, 1984
John Galliano’s feminine bias has often been discussed—understandable when you’re talking bias-cut slip dresses—but his earliest collectsions were as much for him as for her. Example? How about his graduation show, Les Incroyables—literally translating as “The Incredibles” (but not the Pixar type)—named after the masculine incarnation of a band of flamboyant aristocratic ne’er-do-wells during the French Revolution. (The females were dubbed les merveilleux—“marvelous women.”) These early incarnations of punks incited outrage and violence through their clothing, and Galliano harnessed their spirit to the similarly outré and gender-fluid London club scene for a magnetic collectsion that ended up in the window of London’s Browns boutique. It was modeled—and subsequently purchased—by men and women alike. Easily seen as a philosophical precursor to his current gender-bending work at Maison Margiela, if you’re into your fashion history and theory.
Photo: Courtesy of Vivienne Westwood3/10Vivienne Westwood’s Cutting Wit, 1990
Vivienne Westwood has designed menswear since her earliest collectsions in the ’70s; she learned to cut clothes by copying 1950s Edwardian-inspired jackets for her then-partner Malcolm McLaren, in extreme fabrics like Lurex and faux fur—think Divine meets Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. She also mixed it with womenswear throughout her ’80s shows. But in 1990, she staged her first men’s-only collectsion as part of the 38th installation of Pitti Uomo in Florence. Rather than take her inspiration from the city’s tailoring, she instead delved back into the Renaissance, slashing her clothes like 16th-century nobles—although Westwood’s were in denim, a grandiose reimagining of the style you may be more familiar with from New Kids on the Block’s heyday. Marky Mark meets Medici? Only on a Westwood runway. The show’s crowning glory was Westwood’s revival of the eye-popping, priapic codpiece. Less wearable for everyday than that shredded denim, it was best modeled in an intricate fencing match–cum-waltz devised and danced by famed choreographer Michael Clark. Dame Viv keeps up the hijinks to this very day.
Photo: FirstVIEW4/10Putting the G(-string) in Gucci, 1996
Lee Alexander McQueen may have reinvented buttock cleavage as an erogenous zone via his Bumsters (for men and women), Vivienne Westwood may have stuffed guys’ unmentionables into puffed and padded codpieces, but it took Tom Ford to drop the pants completely—and literally. The standout garment from his Spring 1997 Gucci show was a mere slip of a thing: a spandex G-string slung with a glistening metallic Gucci logo, perfectly positioned between the cheeks. Shown on Georgina Grenville, barely an eyebrow raised, but nestled between the pert glutes of a male model, there was outrage. Why? It’s back to that old Gaultier thing—of man as a sex object. But as we all know, sex sells.
Photo: FirstVIEW5/10Raf Simons Shows His “Krafty” Side, 1998
Simons exploded onto the menswear scene in the mid-’90s, launching his eponymous label in 1995 to immediate and lasting acclaim. Why? Because Simons is an experimenter, an innovator, a designer who takes risks. And menswear labels are often a timid lot. Today, Simons’s Fall 1998 collectsion, Radioactivity, looks pretty standard: skinny suits, scarlet shirts, black ties—the whole electro-clash neo–New Wave thing we got used to circa 15 years ago. But Simons’s show predated its popularity by a good quarter-decade, proposing looks dedicated to his teenage obsessions with the music of Joy Division, Depeche Mode, and, above all else, Kraftwerk. Part of Simons’s power is how personal each collectsion seems to be—perhaps few more than this one, which in retrospect looks like the unpacking of Simons’s pubescent mind, and a preview of a decade of menswear still to come. Plus, I’d still kill for one of those killer black suits.
Photo: Bertrand Rindhoff Petroff / Getty Images6/10Hedi Slimane Slims Down Dior Homme, 2001
Speak of the skinny black suit and you end up at Hedi Slimane. In 2001, he presented his Dior Homme debut with much fanfare. And rightly so. Because in one fell swoop—and a clutch of impeccably cut tailoring—Slimane transmogrified the hitherto intrinsically feminine identity of Dior, spinning out a compelling and convincing new notion of masculinity. Dior’s signature fleurs came as calfskin corsages way more homme than femme, the black-and-white contrast of that Bar suit was played out in formal tuxedos, while the focus on superlative suiting highlighted the house’s excellence in tailleur as well as overblown ball gowns. Those aesthetics would be seized on and regurgitated by designers across the globe. But Slimane did them best.
Photo: Condé Nast Archive7/10Alexander McQueen’s Cat Among the Pigeons, 1994
How do you highlight a standout menswear moment from the hand of Lee Alexander McQueen? They’re just as frequent as his womenswear: Men wore his butt-flashing Bumsters, his razor-cut frock coats, and his Saran Wrap plastic. Alongside his women, they walked on water, under torrential downpours, and through rings of fire. From Fall 2004, he showed menswear separate to his women’s clothes—indeed, his last fully realized show, titled An Bailitheoir Cnámh (The Bone Collector), was for men. They had their own individual power, strength, and signature. My personal standout, however, crosses the line between men’s and women’s: The corsetiere Mr. Pearl walked in McQueen’s first runway show, The Birds. He wore a pencil skirt, high heels, and a literally breathtaking corset, his midriff cinched to 18 inches. But from handspan-waist up, he was machismo incarnate in a tuxedo and tie. The visual effect was arresting—and epitomizes, for me, the tense balance between fragility and power, as well as masculine and feminine, that is present in all of McQueen’s finest work. The power of the outfit endures, too: The fashion image is moving and unsettling even today.
Photo: Marcio Madeira8/10Thom Browne’s Ice Capades, 2006
Thom Browne is menswear’s favorite Big Top showman in a teeny-tiny suit. I frequently think Browne can push his runway antics further than anyone else because he has fundamentally transformed the way the modern male dresses: Got a suit with a flood-length pant or a chest-hugging, slightly cropped jacket? It started off, somewhere down the line, with Browne. Not many designers can boast that. Sometimes Browne’s runways are dark and tortured; sometimes they’re silly and playful; sometimes you’re not sure exactly what there is for you to wear. But more often than not, he nails it. His Fall 2006 collectsion, a Bruce Weber winter wonderland of hunks on skates in shorts, colliding sport with suits, still ranks as one of his finest. The spectacle was spectacular, but the clothes were covetable, too. You could wear them today and still look great.
Photo: Marcus Tondo / InDigital | GoRunway9/10Zegna Goes From “Zzz” to Buzz, 2013
Stefano Pilati’s move to Ermenegildo Zegna was, in menswear terms, seismic. Why? Because Pilati was—and is—a cutting-edge and provocative fashion pioneer, the last person you’d expect to take the reins of a brand formerly known for sensible suiting and not much else. “On the one side we ask, ‘What is the risk if we go?’ On the other side, ‘What is the risk if we don’t do anything?’” That’s what Paolo Zegna—a scion of the family that still owns the company—told me, shortly after Pilati’s debut collectsion. They took the risk, and it paid off. Pilati is questioning the very foundations of Zegna—namely, that suit. He’s broken it apart, mismatched it, re-engineered it, and in the process proposed something entirely new for men to wear in the 21st century. The line has been christened Ermenegildo Zegna Couture—which makes me think of Elsa Schiaparelli, declaring couture a laboratory for ideas. The result of Pilati’s ideas is that Zegna has gone from rail-filler to power player in barely two years. “The fashion statement at Zegna stands with Stefano Pilati,” says Pilati. I agree.
Photo: Yannis Vlamos / Indigitalimages.com10/10Rick’s Dicks, 2015
How’s that for a headline?! But indeed, male genitalia took center stage in Rick Owens’s Fall 2015 show. “Boys with their dicks out is such a simple, primal, childish gesture,” Owens told Vogue.com. It’s also a gesture of supreme confidence from a designer who knows his clothes are good enough that they could never be upstaged. Personally, I was more blown away by Owens’s topsy-turvy peacoats than by the penises. But don’t tell him that, please.
