Holland Cotter's front-page story in this week's New York Times Sunday Styles, "Male Models at the Line of Beauty," is ostensibly about the men's fashion shows at New York Fashion Week. Ill-equipped for this assignment (he writes that he was "learning on the job"), Cotter "pulled out [his] old H. W. Janson survey book" in the hopes of ... I'm not sure, exactly. As if taking his cues from the encyclopedic range and limited depth of the Janson book, Cotter jumps from one tenuous, superficial observation to the next: male models are beautiful like Greek statues; models line up on the runway like figures in a Byzantine mosaic (hmmm); utilitarian clothes are like Constructivist garment designs.
Cotter's take on the fashions are also head-scratchingly banal: "Tommy Hilfiger went sort of nuts with nautical stripes at his show" but "the men still looked dressed-down-drab." The article is filled with disclaimers like, "don’t listen to me, an art geek who wandered into a strange new world, about what men’s fashion should do," which makes you wonder how Cotter got stuck with this assignment in the first place.
"I’m deeply skeptical of the fashion-as-art talk of recent years," Cotter writes. His glib treatment of artistic sources here suggest that he may be skeptical of the appeal of fashion journalism to art-lovers as well. Regular readers of the Sunday Styles, of which I am one, might be insulted by this clunker (and our expectations aren't terribly high to begin with). But let's not. Mr. Cotter was probably just having a bad day, and we can always amuse ourselves with the wedding announcements.
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