Revenge of the Waif

The evidence seems to suggest the male waif is at the very least, a sign of his time, a time of raves, gangsta rap and post grunge rock n roll where athletic wholesomeness is decidedly besides the point. This is a period where young consumers are demanding realness not fantasy in their music, film and fashion imagery and style mavens with their antannaes open are getting the transmission.

But these style mavens in question are of another time and context. Pop culture in many ways freeze framed for them circa. 1982. This begs the question therefore, of motives. Designers and photographers construct a body of images that resonate with their own sense of identity. Are these images vicarious reflections of who they'd like to be or frankly who they'd like to do? All these androgynous little boys spread eagled in cut off shorts and baby boy briefs looking so effortlessly....do-able! Were we really hearing the faint crackle of a kind of crypto 70's Times Square video parlor chicken hawk fetish beneath these images? It was this subtext that resulted in the "This Ads Up To Pornography!" CK debacle. It was the blunt presentation of seemingly sexually vulnerable young boys that fueled the artificial outrage. As James Kaplan stated in his New York magazine Klein profile, "What especially got to people was the images of the boys, scrawny and white chested, posing like pin-ups". Had it just been the usual suite of sexually vulnerable young girls then the so called pederastic value of the images would have whisked past unoticed. It's a cultural conundrum Village Voice columnist Amy Taubin isolated in her profile of Larry Clark, maker of the film "Kids" when she discussed his penchant for "the fragile glamour of young bodies yearning for oblivion". Steven Meisel's deliberate embrace of the male waif's 'fragile glamour" has now positioned that figure in the sweetspot of public consciousness as the new "too hot to handle" look and now by default is poised to do with this body type in the 90's, what Bruce Weber did for the sport hunk in the 80s.

But the aura of sexual exploitation that so incensed the critics was never sincere. Meisel's pictures, hard as they tried, enacted an aggressive button-pushing, serving as calculated blow in the public's eye to keep it looking and talking. Steven Meisel is not a natural pornographer (see his Sex book) because pornographers sincerely want you to be turned on by their displays of flesh. Meisel appropriation based ironics means he can never be sincere: He wanted them to utter "No he didn't go there!" and they did. Controversy sells by the truckloads even as the truck keeps on moving. Besides there is another spin on all this peddling of toy boys. Maybe its simply a former enfant terrible re-living the days of his Forest Hills high school youth, wood panelled rec rooms and all. Afterall nostalgia for one's youth is one of the primary indulgences in fashion. Second only to drugs. There is something about that thin young man with his aura of disconnection and danger, the dark side of that alleged Byronic glamour. And when we say danger, lets spit it out, for this is the dark shadow that perturbs most detractors. These young boys, looking so much like wasted rock n roll stars, tore down gangsta-rappers, spaced out ravers reek of the commited overindulgence in narcotic delights that when you are young, you assume you can afford. That "junkie feeling" was the sub-text that freaked the fashion world out when the female contingent of the waif army ruled. It was simply too European, too decadent, too unhealthy to have young people staggering through magazine pages looking so......fucked up. But now that glazed look of ennui has shifted into the eyes of the boys.