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| The truth is in the major media capitals of the world, Paris, New York, L.A, London, heroin and coke are doing howling business and are so unrepentantly fashionable that agencies are receiving calls from copycat photographers specifically requesting models with that I've-been-bingeing-on-Avenue-A look. (As opposed to reality). Suddenly thinness isn't simply "natural" or " androgynous": it becomes a fashionable badge of wasting away. At the same time the social phenomonum preceded the look.Heroin use while more noticeably public, is not an epidemic and its not new. Drugs always will be there as one of the dangerous rites of passage for the young to navigate. Its a perennial rock'n roll thing. Its there in the new crop of Hollywood actors, it has always been there in the fashion cabals. How many nights have we spent in the VIP section of a certain (now defunct) midtown nightclub watching teenaged stars and adolescent millionaires blighted out of their own minds. These facts do not represent an ideal but they represent the reality of the moment. |
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| But as survivors of the late seventies fashion /drug cabal will testify, addiction is never a profitable enterprise (except for the dealer) and there is no doubt that the fashion system though it may dabble with the idea of danger, will never represent a dangerous indulgence to be more than that.As soon as the red line of profitability is crossed all those provocative little flirtations disappear from the image banks. Is the male waif then a walking ad for self destruction? No more than he is a NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association) poster child. If the viewer wants to project these features onto the male waif then that's them failing to understand that the new generation, the new consumers are not vacuous innocents who need to be protected from dirty old men and dirty old needles. As a geneartion we carry with us a kind of pre-mature wisdom. We are a generation that is very aware of the perils of living in the real world. We came of age sexually in the middle of an AIDS crisis and as a survival technique were educated about esoteric variations of the sex act from the get-go. We live in a world where a handgun in the waistband is not an anomaly and a petty street argument can earn a bullet in the face. Unfortuntaely, drugs have come offer one of the few escape routes from the incessant sense of hopelessness 90's urban life imposes. And if moral gatekeepers want the young to project images of wholesomeness and hope, they fail to realize that the pop culture myth of glistening smiles and happy endings has no impact on a generation numbed by reality. This is not the fifties, the rewind button is broken. If the young seem to be retreating into a cocoon of fragility and exhaustion it is because that is what the world around us is inspiring. People are beginning to look the way they feel. |  |
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| What is an important part of the 90's, is the willingness to face up to the brutality of modern life whether it be via gangsta rap's nihlistic honesty or the desoalte amorality of Larry Clarke's "Kids". Urban and (sub-urban) life in its surreal excesses have shot so far ahead of fiction and fashion, the image factory is now struggling desperately to catch up. Realness as the New Glamour is going to run more than fifteen minutes, like it or not, its going to define this decade. |
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| A pre-pubescent androgyny, an unspeakable sexual availability, suspicion of drug indulgence: these are the elements that contribute to the static that crackles around the languid figure of the male waif. How long he will linger before falling into disfavor is a question only the delicate balance between the Zeitgeist and the whims of the image trade will answer. It is like Tora Bonnier one of the editors at New York Web eloquently summarzies "I think the whole idea of the male waif has this erotic side to it that will always linger on a sub-cultural level but commercially it won't stay". The image makers will have their day. They'll extract their share of PR and scandal from this new strange new fetish but then it will all become too boring and a backlash of Goliath's will come marching in to crush these little waifs. Or they'll send the money earning toy boys to the gym, force feed them protein shakes and teach them to bumble charmingly around a runway, like real men. In the mean time skinny boys will be skinny boys, they'll hop their skateboards, strum their guitars, bust their rhymes to the delight of the little girls who understand. Its as trip-hop performert Mank states, "A body type is not a fashion statement. My life is not an ad campaign." |
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