Back in 1990 I ”modelled” in a show for Romeo Gigli in Milan. It was a humiliating experience because I was the least gifted of all the male models. But mostly it was my legs that let me down. This was a skinny-legged year in Italian fashion and my prop-forward pins were too unfashionably beefy for the yellow pants I was poured into. Had I waited until 1992 and tried in the United States, where Calvin Klein was about to usher in a meaty-legged year by choosing ”Marky” Mark Wahlberg as the thighs of his famous underpants, I may have had more luck.
I certainly wouldn’t have been hired this season. Anyone who has looked at pictures from the latest Milan and Paris menswear shows (Prada’s lanky-limbed chaps in plum, Gucci’s sand-kicking targets who could barely fill out their knitted swim shorts, and lads in Raf Simons whose legs had never been near an exercise machine) will know that summer 2008 will be another skinny-legged year.
The cognoscenti will tell you that the Americans do jockish, beefcake legs, the Italians camp, worked-out jobs and the French thin, fey Jarvis Cocker legs. ”We find that most men have skinny legs, anyway,” says Dounia, a booker in the men’s division of Select Model Management. ”That’s the look at the moment — that skinny, indie-rock thing. Hedi Slimane was renowned for his super-slim tailoring and he set the trend.”
I have another theory: a male model’s fluctuating thigh girth is to menswear what skirt hemlines are to women’s prêt-à-porter. In times of prosperity and optimism, thighs are muscular and calves are like hams. In this age of anxiety, we’re back to skinny. The model du jour is thin, flat-chested and small-arsed, with scrawny calves and a triangular gap at the top of his thighs (Viz magazine terms this ”a Toblerone tunnel”). What we have here is a Male Kate Moss: a ”MaKaMo”. — Â