Okay listen, once, I was backstage at Bryant Park covering Fashion Week for a magazine, and I stole a jock strap that had been worn just minutes before on the catwalk by a male model. It was on the ground, I put my foot on it, looked around to see if anyone was watching and dragged that sucker over (while whistling and looking up to the left) and stuffed it in my pocket. It even had the model-who-wore-it’s name written in sharpie on the inside of the waist band. I think it was still warm. Was it unprofessional? Yes. Was there anything at stake? No. Still, I’ve told like one person about this, and it’s time I come clean. I have this ambivalent relationship with male models. They infuriate me but I can’t look away. They clearly believe they are the center of the universe (and in many socioeconomic ways they are), and they’re usually affected, arrogant dolts. And yet, they are pretty.
With that in mind, here’s a video file that was shown at the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards last night with a whole lot of male models doing a cover of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”. It starts out with a young Willem Dafoe-esque model standing there in some important blue green Jackie O number and then, like a regiment of painstakingly rehearsed choir boys, a herd of male models scurry into place and we’re presented with their very own version of Daft Punk’s original. Most of them even keep to the directorial brief and don’t even stare that much at the camera as it pushes through their unsullied ranks.
So – models are interesting aren’t they? Just when you think no one can expect anything more from them, they surprise. Look how they sing, unexpectedly! Isn’t the line “We’ve come too far to give up who we are” inspirational and poignant? They sure HAVE come too far, and there really does seem like there’s so much at risk of being giving up as well. Good work, boys! Stick to your guns! Don’t let anyone tell you who to be! Except, you know, clients who hire you. And what about the end? Just like that, we are left at a kind of altar with a random male model standing there like an oracle about to read to us. IS he an Oracle? What does it all mean? Who knew they could read? There is, quite literally, no end to the possible outcomes when male models are involved.
Also, just as an aside, no matter how hard I try; it’s difficult for me to take the Council of Fashion Designers of America seriously. A council about basically anything else would seem like it was about something. Not this. And yes, I understand that what I’m wearing today was actually chosen for me by the people in that room at Conde Nast like five years ago and that cerulean is a real color, and it’s different from turquoise and that it’s about jobs and everything, but still, it’s sort of like the council version of a French lumberjack. It just lacks a certain authoritarian punch. There’s no There there.
Still, let us simply be mesmerized by the models. Let them calm and then bore and then infuriate and then inspire and then calm and then bore us once again.
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Thank you for making my ears bleed…
Just when we though no one could make a worse cover to this song than the one made by jonas brothers, this fuckers come and prove us wrong.
don’t know the song. Never heard it before. But please, you look at those men’s fashions and don’t any of you say yourselves if even THESE guys cannot make these “designs” look good, how the fuck would an average guy look in them. Clearly Yentil was the theme of menswear this year. It should have been Babs singing “With all there is, why settle for………….. just a piece of sky?”