Thin is in: in search of the perfect male body

The well-built man, complete with six-pack and muscular shoulders, is no longer the ideal male body shape. But when did men start aspiring to be thin? And should we worry?

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• • Polly Vernon  The Observer,  27.05.2011

   “My strange shape is paying off”: Burberry model Davo who is 6ft 1in, with a 35in chest and a 29in waist. Photograph: Levon Biss for the Observer

Are men more body conscious now than they were 10 years ago? Apparently yes. Infinitely more. They're certainly subject to increasingly proscriptive and exaggerated notions on the physical ideal. Rootstein's spindly Homme Nouveau shop window mannequin (27in waist, 33in chest), and Burberry's fit model, cast according to the equally slender proportions of male model Davo, are merely the latest, most headline-grabbing manifestations of the mounting pressure on men to be a certain – diminished – shape.
Consider, for example, that the average British man has a waist size measuring 39in, and yet American Apparel – spiritual home of anyone hoping they might be even the teensiest bit hip – doesn't sell its signature Slim Slack trouser with a waistband larger than 30in. Consider a significant proportion of contemporary male cultural icons: Russell Brand, Pete Doherty, Matt Smith and David Tennant, Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys, Johnny Borrell of Razorlight, nearly all of the Kings of Leon, Nicholas Hoult, any one of the men with whom Kelly Osbourne periodically dallies… Thin, thin and thinner.

Do men – normal, non-celebrity, non-model men – care? Well, yeah – apparently they do. Incidences of eating disorders in men are on the rise. In 1990, 10% of people suffering from anorexia or bulimia were estimated to be men; today it's more like 25%. Figures for women have remained steady throughout that time. Two out of five binge eaters are men. More and more teenage boys say they are dissatisfied with their bodies. The male segment of the plastic surgery market is booming – moob jobs are proving especially popular; in 2009 there was a 44% year-on-year increase in male breast-reduction procedures. So yes, men want to be thinner. Actually – men want to be thin.

And yet traditionally the male physical ideal is the opposite of skinny. It is athletic, buff, big shouldered, capable. It has pecs and guns and ripped abdominals. Until relatively recently, thin men were ashamed, or assumed to be ashamed, of their bodies. They were considered less masculine by dint of their thinness; the rare thin male cultural icons – Morrissey, Jarvis Cocker – made thin part of their shtick, an expression of how disenfranchised they felt, how removed from the cultural mainstream.

But now thin is the cultural mainstream. Thin is desirable. Men want it – men diet for it. They go under the knife in pursuit of it.

The skinny man movement began a decade ago, with an ideal created and perpetuated by fashion designer Hedi Slimane. In 2000 luxury fashion institution Christian Dior appointed Slimane creative director of Dior Homme, its menswear line; in 2001 Slimane showed his first collection. It celebrated a gobsmackingly lean silhouette. Slimane's aesthetic hinged on razor-sharp, super-tight tailoring; and jeans so clinging that they almost qualified as meggings (man leggings). It required a pallid, waifish, concave-chested teenage boy model to do it justice – models Slimane "street cast" by scouting the hipper districts of significant metropolises for Twiglet-form 16-year-old indie boys. Slimane's silhouette gained extraordinary currency – thanks in part to the fact that he made the professionally waifish and ineffably cool Pete Doherty his muse. It set the fashion world on fire; fashion elder statesman Karl Lagerfeld was so impressed that in 2001 he lost a third of his body weight – 90lb, more than six stone – for one reason only: "I woke up and decided I was not happy with my physique… I suddenly wanted to dress differently, to wear clothes designed by Hedi Slimane."

After that, Slimane's influence seeped into the non-fashion sphere, reconfiguring the aspirations of a broader market. Next thing you knew, the streets of our cities were overrun by slender-hipped teenage boys in skinny jeans, their fragile chests visible beneath the plunging "V" on their T-shirts, hoodies dangling off coat hanger-thin shoulders. Slimane left Dior in 2007, but the influence of his work for Dior Homme endures. Skinny is big.

WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that the cultural imperative to be extremely skinny has replaced the cultural imperative for men to be buff. It hasn't. The muscular male ideal has somehow, simultaneously, remained current. The publishing miracle that is Men's Health – a monthly men's glossy magazine which boasts robust circulation figures (more than 250,000 at the last count, the 16th annual increase in circulation) at a time when other men's titles are floundering – has built its brand on cover image featuring extremely well-toned blokes.

The most successful male model in the world currently is David Gandy, a ridiculously muscular Essex boy who made his name frolicking semi-naked in a rowing boat for a 2007 Dolce & Gabbana perfume ad. A year ago I interviewed David Gandy about his career. He told me he had no idea why he was suddenly successful – he'd struggled for a long time to get jobs in a fashion climate that favoured Slimane's skinny boys. "No one was using me, and my mum was going: 'I don't understand why! You're so handsome!' But I was like: 'Mum. There is a reason.' No one wanted the big guys. It was all the skinny, androgynous look. People would look at me very, very strangely when I went to castings."

Other people seemed to know why Gandy's look had started doing swift business. Model bookers, advertising execs and fashion editors agreed that a more robust physical ideal resonates culturally during recessions and times of political uncertainty; the times when we instinctively place more value on men who look like they could take care of themselves. "We saw exactly this in the last recession – and we also saw it directly after 9/11 . Clients stop wanting to take risks. They revert back to basics, to classic ideas of what's handsome," said model booker Heidi Beattie of Select, the agency that represents Gandy.

So we're left with two polarised ideals on masculine beauty. Hedi Slimane-endorsed skinniness via Homme Nouveau and Davo; and a strong, muscular, austerity-resistant Gandy-esque form. These ideals are somehow coexisting, pulling men in two different directions and filling their heads with a general sense that they are nothing if not completely physically imperfect. Cue eating disorders, a general sense of inadequacy, a new, horrible degree of self-consciousness…

What do women think of all this? I'll be honest: we have to work hard not to cackle, and scream: "Welcome to our nightmare, suckers!" We've been subject to these kinds of pressures for centuries, expected to grow and shrink and entirely redefine our body shape depending on prevailing diktats on what is and isn't hot. You, men, have not helped us with your endless, casual objectification, your porno-lite lads' magazines and your inability not to deliver a relentless commentary on every aspect of our physical being. We've struggled between polar physical ideals for decades: between the intimidatingly severe and extremely thin architecture of the catwalk model, and the super-tanned, curvaceous obvious pulchritude of the glamour girl. Relatively, you lot are amateurs at all this.

Do you know what it's like to turn 12 and find your body subject to the scrutiny of the entire world? Do you know what it's like to be constantly judged by the opposite sex and (perhaps more harshly) by your own? To be conditioned to view your body in such a way that you regularly find yourself in a public space (a park, a train carriage, or walking down a street) rating the legs, or bellies, or upper arms of everyone you pass in terms of the merits and failings of your own? Do you know how self-conscious that makes you, how disarmed, how confused, how dissatisfied, how unbelievably freaking vulnerable?

Oh, hang on! You do know now! It is tempting, as women, to respond like this. But it isn't kind, or even useful; society functions less well the more time its constituent parts spend fretting about the shape and placement of their bottoms, so let's not do that.

Let's instead consider the fact that women are not especially concerned by men's bodies, in and of themselves. We don't value buff or skinny in its own right. I'm generalising wildly of course – although it's an informed generalisation, based on 20 years at the coalface of men's bodies. That – and the fact that James Corden is something of a pin-up; that now-slim actor Seth Rogen is widely believed to have lost his appeal since losing the extra few stone he carried when he made his name as an unlikely romantic hero in 2007's Knocked Up.

Twitter agrees. I posted a tweet asking female followers how concerned they were by men's bodies, and 60-odd tweeted back to tell me how much more they valued some configuration of clever, sexy, funny and well-dressed. Many said muscular bodies were a positive turn-off, hinting at unacceptable levels of vanity; a few more said they rather liked skinny, although more again said skinny was fine as long as it wasn't skinnier than they were. "As long as his breasts are smaller than mine, he can be skinny or carrying a little extra weight," said one woman. "If over 50, must be fit. Don't care about handsome or bald… in fact, love bald, if also nebulously hot…" said another. "Would forgive any abdominal shortcomings for sexy hands!" said a third.

Most of us copped unapologetically to rampant heightism.

Women can appreciate a beautiful male body as part of a passable whole. But a body – whether it is fashionably slender, or Gandy-esque and buff – is certainly not worth more that an attractive face and a winning personality. Twitter made much mention of the Body of Baywatch, Face of Crimewatch physical phenomenon – all the women who invoked it said they were not prepared to compromise facial beauty for a good body, when looking for a mate, or even when looking for an inconsequential fling.

But if men are not obsessing over their bodies – reshaping them, hating them, wishing they were different, depriving them of food, cutting them up – in response to pressure from women, then why are they doing it?

Partly, you'd imagine, because of a general cultural obsession with youth. Men are not immune to increasing pressure to remain young-looking. The skinny ideal in particular is a supremely youthful prototype; barely pubescent. Rootstein justified its decision to launch the Homme Nouveau mannequin by explaining that it was designed to showcase clothes meant for young teenage boys. American Apparel has just launched a new trouser style they've branded the Schoolboy Pant.

But there's something bigger and more pernicious even than the cult of youth wielding its influence here. According to Matthew Todd, editor of gay style magazine Attitude: "It's clear that men are far more objectified than they used to be. Our bodies have been commercialised. When I was growing up, it was rare to see half-naked men in advertising; when you did, it seemed like more of a taboo. Now the male body is used to promote everything." Todd's absolutely right. Half of the moodily lit, kinda-erotic images used to sell us things now feature semi-naked men where once they only featured semi-naked women. Adverts like the Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue perfume film which projected David Gandy to fame (and also featured a woman – though no one can really remember who she was). The giant billboards filled with increasingly risqué images of sports stars, of Ronaldo, of Kaká, of Becks. The starkly lit snaps of bearded hip kids which American Apparel favours for its advertising campaigns. The nameless pretty boys in hairdos and homoerotic poses routinely employed to flog anything from pants to rollerball gizmos designed to diminish unsightly undereye shadows to sunglasses. In those images, these men – every last one of them, even the celebs – recline, supine. They are submissive. They gaze up at the cameras from beneath their eyelashes. They are beautiful, commercial coquettes; and they dictate the way we perceive the male form.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. As I've said, society doesn't function brilliantly when significant portions of it are hate their bodies. While men might better understand the pressure women experience to look a certain way as a consequence of all this, they might also end up too deeply mired in a netherworld of self-loathing to be able to do anything about it. The increasing prevalence of male eating disorders definitely isn't desirable. Sam Thomas, project leader of an organisation called Men Get Eating Disorders Too, says that while eating disorders develop for a complex combination of reasons, and cannot merely be assumed to be the consequence of a new type of shop-window mannequin: "Men are certainly under a lot more pressure to look good, to live up to the latest trends now than they were 10 years ago. There's an increased emphasis on male fashion and cosmetics, and this has affected how men perceive their bodies. It's made them more conscious of them… If a man is already feeling insecure about his body, exposure to such 'ideals' could make him feel inadequate and increase his susceptibility to eating disorders." No one wants a manorexia epidemic.

Yet it seems unlikely that this objectification and commercialisation of the male form will abate any time soon. Actually, it feels like it's only just getting started, gaining pace. Cristiano Ronaldo's new Emporio Armani underwear shots – released recently, to the rapture of the internet – are the latest evidence of that. We probably can't stop it; but the women among us can, at least, stop the vengeful sniping over it. As Attitude's Matthew Todd says: "I sometimes hear women say things like: 'It's great – men can get a taste of how it feels to be objectified as women have been for all eternity.' But really we should be working on a way to make it so that physicality is not the defining thing about any of us." Which, of course, we should. Instead we seem to be making it the defining thing about all of us.

Burberry's boy: putting the man into mannequin: Davo McConville describes a casting event

I stand in the centre of a workshop, naked except for skintight cycling shorts, surrounded by model makers. I'm coated with six tubs of Nivea moisturiser before layers of plaster are moulded to my body by John and Tristan Schoonraad, plaster masters to movie stars. They've cast Rambo, Forrest Gump and everyone in between. John recently did Malcolm McLaren's death mask and tells me it's easier to handle the dead. They don't complain so much.

Burberry is shooting coats for a new website. A plastic mannequin is needed to "model" the clothes, but the existing mannequins are too muscular for the Burberry ideal. Which is where I come in. My body will be the model for an all-new skinny mannequin.

I am a very peculiar shape. I've been asked before whether I'm absolutely certain I don't have an eating problem. I'm sure I don't, but I do have very little meat on my bones. My body only decided to grow tall and long when I was past 17 and it resists developing muscular bulk. I've bought weight equipment; I've flirted with sickly protein powders. Nothing has altered my body. But now my strange shape is paying off. I am 6ft 1in, with a 35in chest and a 29in waist, and have the right body for the job. Even so, I don't know that anyone would consider my body archetypal or as an exemplar to work towards. You couldn't aim for this; it's defined by a vacuum of flesh, by what it's not.

I've worked for Burberry before. I spent an afternoon six years ago having test pieces fitted to my body. I was a clotheshorse for their fashion then, as I am today. My body was the point, rather than my face. Burberry's ideal is as tall a figure as possible, the slender body lending an elegance and a hint of androgyny to their tailored apparel.

As a model you quickly come to realise the utter objectivity with which others perceive you. Casting after casting in which one part of your appearance leads to rejection. Two castings in the last year have seen my body fail on exactly the point which won me this job. Both Wrangler jeans and Alexander McQueen's design house thought me too slender for their products (for Wrangler, my ass wasn't big enough).

At Elstree, I think back to a conversation with my agent about whether I'd be happy with naked work. I'm sure I said no, though modesty has no place in fashion. Life-casting goes beyond naked, into the construction of a replica self. I will leave behind two doppelgangers with removable arms. Life-sized voodoo dolls.

After being levered out of my second plaster cocoon, I'm given a plastic safety suit to wear for my walk to the dressing rooms to clean up. I go home filled with the odd knowledge that there'll always be a 1:1 edition of me out there somewhere.

Through thick and thin: why size matters more to some men

Stephen Fry: "I was fed up with having man boobs. I could see silverback gorillas looking at me with envy."

Ricky Gervais: "I laugh about being fat, but I should be ashamed. I should walk down the street and have people shouting: 'Fatty!' That's what I want, to get me out of it."

Jarvis Cocker: "Why do they call a puny person a weed, when weeds are tenacious plants that grow in adverse circumstances?"

Gok Wan: "Growing up I was too busy trying to be the life and soul – the big happy fat character who wanted to be fat, wanted to be gay and wanted to be mixed race – to discuss being bullied with anyone."

Johnny Vegas: "When I'm out shopping I need XXX size clothes and in America it is the one time in my life that I can glance at people looking at the larger-sized clothing and think to myself: 'How did they let themselves get like that?'"

James Corden: "My weight was never a concern for me, because I could make women laugh."

Will Self: "For a period I was morbidly obese. I went out with a feeder."

Alan Carr: "I wouldn't mind something happening with my back boobs – they hang over the chair like a cape."

Will Young: "I look bigger than I used to, but I feel like a man, so I quite like it."

Paris haute couture: Chanel and Givenchy - in pictures

Flat shoes, flying feathers and some statement headgear: the haute couture shows continue in Paris with grande dames Chanel and Givenchy

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Chanel's shows are often huge and oppulent affairs, but yesterday's show was a smaller, more intimate collection, staged in an old bank building opposite Coco Chanel's old apartment Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

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Storm from the east: Japan's finest fashion designers

They overthrew the old order and revolutionised the way we dress

By Susannah Frankel  Saturday, 2 October 2010

CHAD PICKARD & PAUL MCLEAN

Comme des Garçons: Jacket, £1,165, and skirt, £1,145, Comme des Garçons, from Dover Street Market, 17-18 Dover Street, London W1, 020 7518 0680. Shoes, £100, H by Hudson, from Office, office.co.uk

• More pictures

In fact, the designers in question are resistant to the idea of being pigeon-holed as a result of their nationality. "I don't deny that my national identity is reflected in my work," Kurihara, who trained at Central Saint Martins in London once told me. "I'm influenced by the environment where I grew up, especially by my experience at Comme des Garçons. But I don't think my way of working would change if I was another nationality, my standpoint would be the same. One can't help but be influenced by the way one has grown up and from the place where one happens to live, but nationality is pure chance."

With this in mind, any aesthetic closeness, or indeed disparity, aside – each designer is clearly informed by both Japanese culture and clothing, however lateral their take on it may be – there is a unifying spirit here that is intent on innovation and challenging preconceived notions of beauty. It's small wonder that this is fashion embraced by those who wish to stand out in a crowd.

As compared to the bourgeois values of French fashion in particular, these designers fly in the face of any conse

They overthrew the old order and revolutionised the way we dress

By Susannah Frankel  Saturday, 2 October 2010

CHAD PICKARD & PAUL MCLEAN

Comme des Garçons: Jacket, £1,165, and skirt, £1,145, Comme des Garçons, from Dover Street Market, 17-18 Dover Street, London W1, 020 7518 0680. Shoes, £100, H by Hudson, from Office, office.co.uk

• More pictures

rvatism, eschewing the ideal of an hour-glass woman dressed in body-conscious (and restrictive?) candy-coloured chintz and tottering on talon heels in favour of a rather more thought-provoking and indeed thoughtful silhouette that tends, with notable exceptions, to envelop the body more than expose it, creating an intimate dialogue between garment and wearer. Notions of status, too, are undermined: power, in each of these designers' hands, is expressed in more complex a manner than, say, the padding of a shoulder or breadth of a lapel.

All also share both technical expertise and the desire to experiment with fabric, cut and proportion – theirs is a pioneering viewpoint. In a world ruled by corporations saturating an already over-crowded market with homogenous styles, the fruits of their labours are a sight for sore eyes.

Comme des Garçons

Boiled wool, deconstructed tailoring borrowed from menswear and black as fashion's (non-) colour of choice over the past 30 years are just some of the contributions Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons has made to fashion since the start of her auspicious career.

Remarkably, she had no formal training. Instead Kawakubo, who was born in Tokyo in 1942, started out in the marketing department of a chemical manufacturer and, when she couldn't find the clothes she needed to style advertising campaigns, designed them herself.

Kawakubo first showed in Paris in 1981. It is the stuff of fashion folklore that so upset was the audience by her designs that some fled in tears. Kawakubo appeared to be uninterested in clothing that was conventionally flattering. Instead her designs were oversized, distressed and worn with flat shoes.

The radical aesthetic was swiftly adopted by the design-conscious intelligentsia and it wasn't long before the principles behind her early work were as much a part of the fashion lexicon as pencil skirts and stiletto heels. Kawakubo has attached frilly pink dresses to the fronts of black jackets; experimented with padded clothing. Here we see an example of how she transforms a body, as opposed to simply adorning it.

Junya Watanabe

There are only a very few designers working today who rival the pattern-cutting skills of the Comme des Garçons protégé Junya Watanabe; born in Tokyo in 1961, he is respected for his tailoring the world over. Reinventing classics is central to the viewpoint here, and in Watanabe's hands wardrobe staples such as the trench coat or the trouser suit become objects of beauty both on the body and off it – extremely complex, they are moulded via intricate panelling and a web of seams.

Like Miyake, Kawakubo and Yamamoto, Watanabe shows little interest in passing trends. Instead, he takes an idea that captures his interest and imagination every six months and develops it. So one season the point of the exercise is an exploration of waterproof clothing; the next, patchworked denim may be the order of the day. These, plus garments cut in so many layers their hems resembled the pages of antique books, a Chanel bouclé wool suit in acid colours, a belle époque-line skirt, and more, have all made their way down this designer's catwalk. Watanabe's interest in American heritage clothing has also led to past collaborations with the Levi Strauss company.

As for the styling... Watanabe has, in the past, wrapped models' beautiful faces in studded black gaffer tape or perched bouquets of dried flowers on their heads. Marvellous. Pictured here is a seminal look from the designer's current collection, a study of military clothing that went to prove, like none other before it, that this can be as beautiful and even tender as anything more obviously feminine in nature.

Tao

From the mighty Comme des Garçons stable of designers is Tao Kurihara, who was born in Tokyo in 1973 and raised in the city. She worked at Comme des Garçons as assistant to Junya Watanabe and, like him, also as designer of the Comme des Garçons Tricot line.

For the autumn/winter 2005 season, Kurihara launched her own line, shown in the modest, bright and resolutely utilitarian environs of the Comme des Garçons Paris showroom in Place Vendôme. No soundtrack or elaborate choreography was needed to establish this then bright young name as a rising star. Kurihara's knitted lingerie-inspired looks were captured in the pages of W that same season, so sweet, witty and technically accomplished were they.

From thereon in she has given the world pretty white trench coats made out of vintage Swiss handkerchiefs, and paper wedding dresses that made any past attempts at the art of origami pale into insignificance. Then there was 1980s-inspired sportswear and a collection of blankets and stoles wrapped around the body to ever more lovely effect. Of all the Comme des Garçons designers, Kurihara's work is perhaps the most youthful, although she shares with her cohorts a desire to create highly individual fashion that has little to do with passing trends. Also, while many designers are resorting to nostalgia, this is fashion that eschews the detail and decoration of past decades, referring instead only to itself.

Yohji Yamamoto

There is a profoundly poetic quality to the work of 68-year-old Yohji Yamamoto, who is still based in his native Tokyo, and who debuted on the Paris catwalk alongside Kawakubo.

Japanese workwear – and men's workwear in particular – lies at the heart of his aesthetic, although for the past 15 years a more overtly feminine and couture-like quality has infused his label with an unparalleled romanticism.

Yamamoto, too, made his name designing dark, oversized clothes, principally in black, although he has also favoured navy gabardine. Both shades, he has said, are used to ensure that all attention is focused on the intricacy of cut and proportion over and above surface embellishment that is, for the most part, kept to a minimum.

A Yamamoto trouser suit is always a thing of great – if rarely entirely conventional – beauty. The jacket may be so roomy it is indebted to the Zoot suit, or tiny and curvaceous with the most narrow sleeves in the industry; the accompanying skirts and/or trousers tend to be roomy and long.

Yamamoto is not interested in clothing that is sexually blatant. Instead a subtle eroticism is expressed by the exposure of a narrow back, for example, or merely the flash of an ankle, although these are often clad in thick black socks and shoes that are as resolutely flat and heavy as his touch is elsewhere light.

In particular, Yohji, as he has been known since the mid-1980s, creates extremely beautiful coats and long dresses (the thinking woman's evening attire) that may appear entirely classic, but are almost always idiosyncratic. The coat pictured here, for example, may look simple on the hanger. Move in it, however, and the profile of a woman is somehow cut into it to brilliant and quite moving effect.

Issey Miyake

Born in Hiroshima in 1938, Issey Miyake rose to prominence in the 1970s, opening his own design studio at the beginning of that decade. He trained in the traditional French manner and worked both at Guy Laroche and Givenchy in Paris before moving to New York, where he was employed by Geoffrey Beene.

Once working under his own name, Miyake's designs had little in common with the aforementioned designers. Instead he explored bamboo and rattan bodices, waxed-paper jackets and hats, and pleated designs, famously captured as geometric still-lives by the unflinching eye of Irving Penn.

So successful were the latter they resulted in the launch, in 1988, of the Pleats Please line of separates which made Miyake's name the world over. Twenty years on, in collaboration with Dai Fujiwara, Miyake introduced A-POC (A Piece Of Cloth), comprising a single, brightly coloured roll of fabric, complete with dotted lines – outlining a sweater, a shirt, skirts of varying lengths – that the customer was encouraged to cut out and customise herself.

Miyake stepped aside in the late 1990s and Naoki Takizawa was named designer of the main line. In 2006 Fujiwara, whose work is seen here, took over and upholds the Miyake aesthetic to this day. But last month in Paris the house's namesake, an irrepressible septuagenarian, launched a new project, 132 5 – computer-generated, sustainable clothing, some of which will be seen in the new show.

'Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion' is at the Barbican Art Gallery from 14 October (barbican.org.uk)

Model Alek at Select Makeup Natusmi at Caren using Chanel A/W 2010Hair Chris Sweeney at DWM using Shu Uemura Art of Hair

Make-up assistant Hiroe Stylist's assistant Emma Akbareian