Troubling 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.

Then there are the ones that played out — cargo pants, camouflage, faux hawks, and Caesar cuts — because every guy you passed on the street jumped on the bandwagons. Lastly, there are the Untouchables — the Sucios — that still turn up in dark corners of the world: soul patches, extreme fade haircuts, Mantyhoses, Members Only jackets, Fabio hair, mandanas, and tribal tattoos that retain their claw-like hold on the oblivious.

The Porn ‘stache as this year’s most omnipresent trend polarizes as extremities are wont to do, in no small part due to the fact that there’s little in the way of mitigation when it comes to pulling it off with any sort of aplomb. It may not be as impossibly impractical as a Francois Sagat full-cranium tat or the genital-wilting braided beard, but you’ve got to be near the top rung of the ladder in terms of attractiveness (like this fine guy on the left) in order to even ironically attempt it.

The best case scenario is an ’80s Brawny paper towel coverboy mien; fail in your venture, and you risk the ignobility of looking like that cop from Sleepaway Camp. Virtually every postpubescent male celebrity has opted for some variant on the quicker picker upper, ranging from the appealing (George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Thomas Jane), to the dismaying (Brad Pitt, Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law), to the rape whistle-ready (the hideous Fu Manchus adorning Easter Island-headed Michael Phelps and douche-faced Pete Wentz).

Though satire-inclined urban hipsters (these are the same guys who tried to bring back the zoot suit during the especially lame late-90′s swing dance resurgence) are the ones likely to be given credit for sporting the look and propelling it back into the public eye, the truth is the Porn ‘stache has remained extant in various circles since the advent of hardcore porn in the late ’60s. (read the full article)

Typically, 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.

It’s the photography — managing to be hot, cartoonish, self-lampooning, candy-colored, cheeky, edgy, and geeky all at once without collapsing under its own weight — that really puts this line gleefully over-the-top. Everything about the Sleeping Beauty by way of The Road Warrior tableau at left is pitch-perfect: Prince Charming remixed as a burr-cut urban black knight in body armor, the Disney-worthy matte background, the emerald forest of imposing thorns, and the looming shadow of the dragon. Bridging the wide gap between Cruising and Dragon’s Lair is no mere feat, and that means even an ice-hearted label-hater like me has a melting point.

GQ 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. The Babes In Toyland aesthetic is never so much hot as it is uncanny.

At fifty, Ken as a perfect human lifestyle trapping for the fashion-forward gal is so fraught with competing connotations that he’s verging on being prefab Frankensteinian.

Or maybe My First Rocky Horror?

Male 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. Browse through labels and fashion campaigns by year. Read interviews that pose the question “Can a man with scruples make it in the modeling business?” You can even rediscover your favorite models of yesteryear (remember when you couldn’t even open a magazine without seeing Mark Vanderloo?) and recast Blow-up in your mind — with you in the lead!

The Fashion Industry: punishing the female form and humiliating the male one for centuries.

Andy Warhol always liked two types of personalities: unconventionally attractive urban weirdies who were great talkers and pretty non-entities who made great scenery.

This falls somewhere between the kicky rise-to-fame montage from Valley of The Dolls and the playfully tragic gasoline fight from Zoolander.

“Did you ever think that maybe there was more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good-looking?!”

Beauty 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.

Now, never once has a smile — essentially an involuntary facial reflex we’ve ascribed a social magic to and that any sociopath can flash at will — won me over, nor have I ever noticed another person’s teeth when I meet them. Men will buy penis enhancement pills and women have tried creams that purport to enlarge their breasts, but if I applied that logic beyond genitalia and offered you a product that could, say, increase the length of your arms or legs, would you buy it?

It’s the beauty mandate called tanning — more than even steroids — that I loathe the most. As a lifelong paleface, I’ve been made privy — always without asking — to casual urgings that I should get some sun to make myself more appealing, the implication being that fairness makes you some sort of of photosensitive albino who dwells in darkness with a cadre of bats and mushrooms as your sole companions.

One barely-casual acquaintance (a cunt) I encountered in a gym (wherein everyone always looked as if they’d just traipsed in off the Aegean seashore year-round) advised me that I looked positively anemic and waif-like. All the while I simply took in the extremity of his sun worship and marveled how, at maybe thirty-six, the pores on his arms were craterous, his skin had the tone more so of adobe than sunkissed, and he was developing bastard lines that ran from his eyes down to his jawline.

How weirdly paradoxical the obsession with epidermal beauty is; it would be the nadir of tactlessness to suggest that a non-caucasian should lighten his skin — those who would or even do are viewed as the ultimate of sell-outs — yet we who are naturally fair are pressured to alter our pigment as if it were nothing. (read the full article)

Oh 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. The deftly cut-to-the-chase Guys With iPhones is glad to chronicle the glorious self-love you’ve helped to propagate. Why, there was a time when Narcissus only had a reflecting pool to gaze in, so he’d be elated with the latter-day myth that apparently no one even remotely unfortunate-looking owns you.

It’s a convenient win-win situation for everyone, the vainglory-obsessed provided with endless opportunities to admire themselves while being admired, while we the beholders can reap the combined benefits of phone sex and the self-reflexive nudie pic in one shot.

Also see John Calendo’s Hello World…It’s Me!

“How verdant is the heather, how manly are my loins?”

The song rings down the glade as the Highlands meet the Lowlands.

The kilt is back with a vengeance, though it never truly went away.

Old by 19th Century standards when it was popularized by the Scots, the garments are becoming more visible than ever. The Scottish Military still requires them as a uniform. In Europe, rugby players and their roughneck fan base don them on and off the field. They’re even turning up on the runway. Now the kilt even has a fab subcultural acronym: the M.U.G., i.e. the Modern Unbifurcated Garment.

Why the resurgence at this time in history? Aesthetics for starters. The look is undeniably hot and surprisingly complimentary to nearly every type and age of man.

Legs characterized by granite thighs and vascular calves can often be a man’s best feature after all. The kilt accentuates the power of the waist, the breadth of the shoulders, the contours of the hips. (read the full article)