Boom! and Bust: Elizabeth Taylor and the Fashion Shrapnel of Fascism
By Glenn Belverio / Sunday, September 30th, 2012 / (2) Comments“Go ahead! A single bullet can never destroy the beauty of fascism!” –Mink Stole, Desperate Living.
The first time I visited EUR, Mussolini’s failed Fascist wonderland on the outskirts of Rome, was back in July 2001. That was the year the Eternal City’s left-wingers were fomenting dissent in response to the recent re-election of right-wing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. By chance, I met one of said left-wingers at a gay sauna called Europa–but, of course, the only reason I was there was so I could sit in the steam room and sweat out all the champagne I had drank the night before.
Stiff Upper Lip: Porn ‘Stache Rides Again
By Shawn Baker / Monday, May 30th, 2011 / (16) CommentsTroubling men’s style trends are not unlike sex crimes.
Some we walk into like a punch and resist them with everything we’ve got. Others leave us ashamed, wondering if we were somehow asking for it, and over-exfoliating with the loofah.
Some era-specific fads that fell by the wayside in retrospect worked rather well and could warrant being brought back into rotation: Nehru jackets, Carnaby Street suits, Beatle boots, and quiffs cut fine turns on the right men.
New York Knights: Dick, Trick, Slick Fantasia
By Shawn Baker / Friday, April 8th, 2011 / (1) CommentTypically, the only thing I loathe more than fashion is fashion photography — so daring, so risque, so overindulgently pretentious that it makes my teeth ache.
Still, even I have to give when it comes to designer David Mason’s Slick It Up line — an eye-opening fetish-meets-concrete swagger collection colliding the street, the club, the bedroom, and the sex dungeon together in one vinyl cutaway supernova.
Wrapped In Plastic: Ken I Get A Witness?
By An Unpaid Intern / Monday, March 7th, 2011GQ Style Germany celebrates Barbie’s & Ken’s golden anniversary with this eerily precise, candy-colored layout — featuring the dolls’ too-silken blond locks and ever-bent arms — that’s speaking volumes about where we as gay men have come from and where we’re going.
Seriously, I’ve seen this look on actual human beings, and somehow the whole never seems to be more than the sum of its doll parts: pixie hair, spray tan, contacts, tweezed brows, joy boy wardrobe, that weird waxen smoothness to the face courtesy of Botox.
Models, Inc.: They Had Faces Then!
By Nightcharm / Thursday, January 27th, 2011Male models are sort of like mosquitoes — their true purpose is hard to fathom, they’re adept at attaching themselves to rich hosts, and when one falls by the wayside, two more seem to pop up. Is there a better calling card claim to fame than “International Model”?
Still, nostalgia legitimizes pretty much anything, so if clothes horses, pouters, and Zoolanders are your bag, then do pay a visit to MaleModel.Retro and peruse through the eras of genetically-blessed bitches smoldering and eating up the lens.
The Last Tan Line: A Whiter Shade of Male
By Shawn Baker / Thursday, September 17th, 2009 / (8) CommentsBeauty is the cruelest of task masters.
When it comes to the Pretty Principle, enough is never enough. Between all the body-sculpting, aerobicizing, waxing, hair coloring, moisturizing, and airbrushing, the building of the perfect beast is beginning to wear us down. There’s a quagmire of products that promise to augment your lips, thicken your eyelashes, or brighten your smile, all of which are supposed to unlock some hidden potential you lack in influencing people.
The New Narcissi: Hot Pieces with iPhones
By Shawn Baker / Friday, April 10th, 2009 / (7) CommentsOh iPhone, is there no end to your totemic ability to synergize?
The oft-lamented bad cliché is that technology only perversely distances us from one another instead of connecting us, but yours is a multi-purpose ingenuity that provides us with our most essential of needs: peers into the lives of inhibition-deficient hot pieces and their tendency for spontaneous thread-doffing at home, at the gym, or anywhere else they can find a reflective surface.
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