Jop van Bennekom, co-founder, creative director and editor of Fantastic Man, says that as well as showing diversity, the shoot offered “an unbiased look at the male body without it being sexualised”.Ī typically androgynous JW Anderson menswear look. Yes, I wanted him to look handsome and everything but I didn’t want them to say: ‘Look at me, I’m really hot’ – I hate all that, it’s embarrassing.” McLellan, who also shot the naked story for Fantastic Man, which featured men aged between 22 and 52, and was accompanied by an essay on the ageing process of the male body, said the shoot was about creating characters who were appealing but “not necessarily in a fanciable way”.
“When you see nudes it’s all very airbrushed, the pubic area is always very shaved, like an Adonis.” McLellan, too, says the images of Morgan – which are deliberately raw and explicit – were supposed to “feel very real. “It wasn’t meant to be specifically shocking or erotic, just honest,” he says. Photograph: Alasdair McLellan/Man About Townīen Reardon, editor-in-chief of Man About Town, says his nude cover was not a PR stunt, though he concedes that it has got the magazine attention. The limited edition cover of Man About Town shot by Alasdair Mclellan. “I think Rick Owens is a very, very clever man but he’s suddenly a big noise even though he hasn’t changed what he does for 15 years.”
“He just did it to shock,” says Robert Johnston, style director of British GQ. Others see Owens’ show as a simple bid for social media coverage for his brand – just as Karl Lagerfeld does by creating gob-smacking sets for his Chanel shows. “I wanted to present something graceful and classical like a Degas’ painting of young Spartans exercising … And doing it in a runway context had the advantage of making it anarchic and Arcadian at the same time,” he says. But isn’t it great when something is sacred and profane at the same time?” He declines to reveal whether he will be going commando this autumn in one of his own ensembles but does suggest that fashion shows aren’t always about the garments shoppers will actually wear. “The social rule to keep the penis hidden just gives it a power I’m not sure it merits. Owens, for one, claims his motivations were pure: “I was just questioning why we keep penises concealed and why exactly it’s bad to show them,” he tells me. Why is all this nakedness happening now? Are men less bothered by seeing other men in the buff? Is it all PR and noise? Or perhaps there’s a new confidence – and fresh experimentation – coming from within the men’s fashion industry, which is reportedly growing 1.5 times faster than women’s. But there is a rawness to this new presentation of nudity, and in the case of McLellan’s work, a sense of Britishness that feels far from the perfect bodies and fabulous tans of so much of what has gone before in fashion. Of course male nudity in fashion is nothing new: Bruce Weber has long photographed well-endowed, tanned men wearing nada and frolicking on beaches Tom Ford launched the M7 fragrance with a full-frontal campaign during his YSL years. Rick Owens’ now notorious autumn/winter 2015 menswear show. Meanwhile, in the 10th anniversary issue of Fantastic Man, there was a full-nude shoot featuring men of various ages. More recently, bi-annual style magazine Man About Town featured the model Michael Morgan nude on its limited edition cover, also shot by McLellan – the limited run of 500 sold out in 10 minutes. Meanwhile, last season, photographer Alasdair McLellan shot a Raf Simons/Sterling Ruby collections story for Arena Homme+ featuring two naked images of the model Danny Blake one was full-frontal nude, the other featured a jumper with nothing on the bottom half. Cue a storm of media coverage and the Instagram hashtag: Dick Owens. The designer – who has a made a career out of creating highly expensive leather jackets – sent out several models minus underwear in tunics featuring peepholes, cut to reveal their genitals.
In January, at Rick Owens’ Paris fashion week show, penises swung gently down the runway. That’s right, chaps, this season cocks are in – or, perhaps more specifically – out. Because the hottest trend in menswear right now is not about clothing but the lack of it. The phrase “emperor’s new clothes” is rolled out all too often in fashion – but this season it could be bang on the money.
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