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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Are you really interested in what men wear? Do you rifle hungrily through your Sunday paper to extract the semi-annual color supplement on men's style? Does an outfit in the window of Bergdorf's men's store ever stop you in your tracks like the flashback from a dream? Does Bergdorf's men's store have windows? I don't recall. Most wondrous clothes that make men ineffably poetic figures are on the walls of the Met or in news footage from Afghanistan. Since the nineteenth century, when the Western ruling class adopted the uniform of a dark, tailored suit worn with a shirt and tie, men's fashion (not to put too fine a point on so obvious a truth) has been militantly prosaic. The rise of the merchant prince coincided with the decline of fashion as a theatre in which men wore romantic costumes. It coincided, in fact, with the decline of culturally sanctioned male vanity, flamboyance, and insouciance. The courtier or the tribesman is freer than the self-made man in one respect: a modern identity is less stable, and demands more psychic effort to maintain, than a traditional role. The ceaseless effort to prove one's worth diverts ambition from more luxuriant forms of self-expression.
It is, in short, considerably more rewarding, creatively and financially, for most of the designers who showed their Spring-Summer 2004 menswear collections last month in Milan and Paris to work for the avid and knowing clients who best appreciate their gifts--women. Men's fashion represents a fraction of their business, and one that is, for the most part, in steep decline. A general sense of crisis may help to explain the lassitude of buyers and critics, though perhaps it was partly the side effect of a spectacular heat wave that broke records for June.
In Milan, an African sirocco stirred migraines, excited great swarms of mosquitoes, and, like a cosmic hair dryer, blew curls of torrid yellow dust through graffiti-scarred streets and drought-scorched piazzas. The sun faded the rainbow "Pace" banners that were hung to protest the war in Iraq. Housewives draped tarps or bedsheets over their shutters, which gave the city's working-class districts the air of a bedraggled encampment. Its industrial outskirts, where a number of shows were held in hangars or sheds, became a giant kiln of cinder block and corrugated tin. The power failed; residents were warned to avoid taking elevators; and it was even a little dangerous to wear stilettos: they sank half an inch into the melting tar, impaling one's legs to the spot while one's torso pitched forward, head first, like a stone launched from a slingshot. In such a climate, a fur coat from the fall collection already in the window of Valentino's men's boutique on the Via Montenapoleone was as tempting as a hair shirt, and an alligator jacket with a price tag of twenty thousand euros might have found a buyer had it come with a muddy river in which to wallow.
Many shows played to escape fantasies--of Alpine lakes, luffing mainsails, crashing surf, island breezes, piney woods, and Riviera sunsets--that tortured the parched souls condemned to review them under sweat-lodge conditions. Yet, even though the weather made news, the collections will probably be remembered as the season of the cowboy. The New York Times ran Cathy...
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