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By Bethany Webb
Here comes the size-zero geeks.
GONE are the tanned, muscular males of the eighties and nineties that the girls went crazy for, and slowly but surely a new, skinnier, more awkward figure has taken on the role of the pin-up icon.
The geeks are finally having their day. It was a steady process to begin with, many will recall forcing their boyfriends to adopt a Seth Cohen haircut and listen to Death Cab for Cutie. But now they’re everywhere. The kid you once wanted either to ignore or steal their lunch money from is now producing the hottest music, starring in the biggest films and perhaps most disturbingly, taking over the catwalk. The recent London Fashion Week featured an army of size-zero models, only this time it was men that were causing sirens amongst health charities and the general public.
The craze for skinny male models began with Christian Dior designer Hedi Slimane in 2000, who designed clothes specifically for models with an almost skeletal frame. The trend has accelerated recently, peaking this year on the catwalks of Milan, Paris and New York. For the first time male models are under just as much pressure as women to keep their weight dangerously low, and with great cost to both the fashion hungry public and some of the fashion industry itself, which finds itself struggling to sell clothes that the majority of the public are unable to wear.
With Western culture continuing to adopt the geek persona into its everyday life, could it mean that the fashion industry will suffer?
Just looking back over the past year is enough to spell trouble for an industry based on looks and not the kooky personality that gave the nerds their name. Turn to any page in NME and there will be one looking back at you.
Even the film industry has gone crazy for the socially deprived, with directors such asMichael Baycasting a pubescent stuttering Shia LaBeouf as Transformer’s lead role. One of last year’s biggest comedies, Superbad, centres around the painfully shy, overweight Jewfro and…McLovin. Michael Cera even got his own show.
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