February 9, 2008
-
Trend Spotters,Romney Exits. ,Toddlers,Current State of Fashion,Maureen Dowd
- Putting Trend Spotters on the Spot MAISON ET OBJET Paris
Richard Harbus for The New York Times (lights and Mr. Harbus); Nigel Dickinson for The New York Times (bowl)Left: Vanessa Mitrani’s pierced vase; Center top: Bocci lights; Center bottom: a Friedemann Bühler bowl; Right: Jean-Philippe Prugnaud, a Parisian trend spotter
Nigel Dickinson for The New York TimesCOLOR AND FANTASY For Lladró, the British design team Committee created figurines of a couple covered with pastel flowers
Putting Trend Spotters on the Spot
MAISON ET OBJET, the semiannual home furnishings trade fair, which took place outside Paris last week, is one of the largest events of its kind in Europe and one of the most influential in terms of what new designs will make it to market.
So it is not surprising that editors of design magazines and others whose work involves understanding the vagaries of the home furnishings market flock to the show. Or that, once there, moving among more than 3,000 vendors spread out across 1.3 million square feet of exhibition space, many of them turn for guidance to the so-called Maison et Objet Observatory, a panel of architects, designers, stylists and trend forecasters who regularly produce a book and three product-focused installations for the fair to identify emerging trends.
But this year the theme for the installations was “dreamy,” and two of the three were as abstract as the quasi-poetic language that the observatory’s members generally use in their written trend assessments.
François Bernard, a Parisian home furnishings forecaster, presented a series of entirely white rooms with very few products from the show; the rooms were described on the show’s Web site as a place to “lose yourself and lose your bearings in the radical maximalism of a whiteness that resists overflow.” In one room, a white resin sculpture depicted a suite of Louis XV furniture being absorbed by a wall; in another, a ceiling-mounted video screen over a big white bed showed a slowly undulating red whale.
Elizabeth Leriche, a Paris style consultant and designer, tried to “promote new thinking about ways of consumption,” she said, with her observatory exhibit of one-off pieces and limited editions by artist-designers, including a park bench sprouting sinuous wood tendrils and tufted leather blobs that looked like melted furniture.
The one installation that showed a wide variety of products from the fair, by Vincent Grégoire of the Nelly Rodi trend forecasting agency in Paris, was something of a grab bag. It did not go far toward identifying any trend beyond “random combinations,” with its mix of glass vases constrained by metal cages, printed packing tape, large-scale fashion photographs and a pillow showing Margaret Thatcher.
“Faced with an unappealing daily existence and uncertain future,” text on the wall explained helpfully, “it’s time to strike a new attitude!”
In the absence of much practical direction from the official sources, and given the disparate merchandise visitors had to sort through in a few days (Jan. 25 to 29), the Maison et Objet seemed like a good opportunity to put the discipline of trend forecasting to the test.
Would journalists and forecasters at the show reach a consensus, independent of outside influences, about where things are headed, or would they pick out patterns that suited their own tastes, looking for “the trends you want to see,” as Michelle Ogundehin, the editor in chief of British Elle Decoration, put it?
Ms. Ogundehin and four others whose business it is to spot what’s coming next were asked to accompany a reporter on separate rounds of the show and to describe trends they were seeing.
Results of this exercise may surprise skeptics. Choosing different examples and using different words, the five broadly agreed on a few distinct currents in furnishings design and on some reasons behind them.
There were conflicting readings, too, of course, particularly in the realm of color . And there was quasi-poetic, abstract language worthy of the observatory.
But five hours with five forecasters was enough to persuade one skeptic that forecasting trends in the design world — finding order and meaning in the mishmash of consumer culture — is as much legitimate discipline as bogus science.
Honesty
“With what appears to be a recession, people are not moving, so they are not buying lots of furniture,” Ms. Ogundehin said early in her tour of the fair. “But they are making smaller purchases to update their houses” — purchases, she believes, that have to do with “value, care, and having things that mean something.”
In design, as in politics, we are apparently ready for things that embody what Ms. Ogundehin calls the new honesty. The term seems to refer to visible wood grain, for one thing, and evidence (or at least the suggestion) of the maker’s hand, for another.
As an example, she offered the Orizuru, or paper crane, a sculptural plywood chair from the Japanese Yamagata Koubou workshop folded like a half-finished piece of origami.
Michelle Lamb, the chairman of Marketing Directions, a forecasting company in Eden Prairie, Minn., that focuses on the home furnishings sector, was drawn to the same features on a smaller scale, in wood bowls by Friedemann Bühler of Germany.
Mr. Bühler’s surprisingly thin bowls, which Ms. Lamb described as “the eco trend being expressed freely in found wood,” are an earthy blend of raw material and refined craftsmanship, with vivid, fingerprintlike grain. Occasional star-shaped cutouts come as a result of removing knots or branches; there are no gratuitous decorative gestures.
Silk panels hand-painted in traditional wallpaper patterns from de Gournay, a British company, also charmed Ms. Ogundehin with their artisanal authenticity, as did tiny handmade porcelain bowls from Studio Potomak, a ceramics studio outside Venice.
Each sample featured a different colored glaze that had been swirled in the bottom of the bowl, leaving a pool of color at the bottom and a trail to the rim: honest evidence of their process.
The “look of the hand” is nowhere more in demand than in the luxury market, said Jean-Philippe Prugnaud, the president of the Mint Group, a buying consultancy with offices in Paris and Milan and retail clients like Saks Fifth Avenue.
“Right now, it’s hard to pinpoint one dominant design direction,” he said. “But things that are obviously well crafted with unusual combinations of materials are extremely desirable, since so much is mass-produced.”
He cited a group of little boxes made of metal, bronze, shell and stingray by the Paris designers Ria and Yiouri Augousti, and their new tables with semiprecious stones set into bronze.
At the hipper end of the style spectrum, Mr. Prugnaud was drawn to a line of suspension lights made of amorphous porcelain elements hand-molded by the Canadian firm Bocci, which, he said, expressed the same idea.
Libby Sellers, who runs a traveling London design gallery and is a former curator at that city’s Design Museum, also talked about honesty, pointing to the products and packaging of a year-old Danish company called Mater, which proclaims a philosophy of social responsibility based on the 10 principles of the United Nations‘ Global Compact.
As much as she liked Mater’s brass bowls and trays and wood-and-marble candelabra, the sustainably produced boxes they came in, printed with simple symbols announcing what was inside, where it was made and what it was made from, interested her most. “We don’t have such faith in the structures that run the world,” Ms. Sellers said. “So it’s nice to have some sense that someone is not trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”
Not that all examples of the honesty trend were so aboveboard. Ms. Sellers also liked a line of outdoor furniture in lacy, powder-coated metal by Patricia Urquiola for Emu, an Italian manufacturer, based on a 1950s design from the company’s archives. She was particularly taken with the way Emu used advanced technology to build in a certain measure of variation from piece to piece, an approach she credits the Dutch designer Hella Jongerius with pioneering.
“It’s mass-produced,” Ms. Sellers said, “but they can add in quirk.”
Ms. Lamb, of Marketing Directions, noted another aspect of the cult of authenticity in new countercultural design, like the pierced glassware of a French designer named Vanessa Mitrani — glasses and carafes studded with rings like a young Goth’s tongue — or the NEO collection of knitted rubber bowls and pillows by Rosanna Contadini. In an era of homogeneous design and manipulative marketing, Ms. Lamb said, “they have resonance for young adults, especially when the pieces are so well designed and executed.”
Fantasy
It is not only through the rigors (or veneer) of honesty, though, that designers are rebelling against sameness and corporate culture; some are resorting to surrealism, Ms. Sellers observed.
Zaha Hadid‘s hugely overscaled planters for Serralunga, for instance, were nearly as dreamlike as the observatory’s morphing art-furniture. Ms. Sellers also offered the example of Lladró, the Spanish ceramics company known for kitschy figurines, which has drawn attention in recent seasons by asking young designers to reinterpret the pieces in its archives.
At Maison et Objet, the Lladró stand displayed a fanciful and somewhat uncanny series of figurines by the British design team Committee, in which a couple is slowly overtaken from head to toe with tiny pastel flowers.
There were also tiny boxes in pale blue that bore the impressions of Lladró figurine faces (taken from the molds used to make the figurines) on their tops.
Mr. Prugnaud, too, was interested in fantastical design, which he saw in the work of Jean Boggio, a French jewelry and furniture designer, for Franz, a Taiwanese manufacturer.
Mr. Boggio, who styles himself a créateur de rêves, or dream weaver, on his Web site, showed whimsical metal consoles and enormous ceramic vases bearing motifs of wildly stylized jungle leaves. “It’s Alice in Wonderland going through the looking glass,” Mr. Prugnaud said. “It’s Jean Cocteau‘s surreal Art Deco Orpheus. It’s objects that teach you without telling you.”
Color
“The metallic trend is so prevalent it has almost peaked, but not quite,” Ms. Lamb said, pointing out a sofa (unmissable, really) by Aimé-Cécil Noury and Pierre Dubois of the French design team Les Héritiers, which was covered in a brushed polyester-vinyl fabric embossed with a damask pattern and printed with silver ink.
Ms. Ogundehin agreed: “Last year we wrote about using metallic accents as a way to inject a jolt of gorgeousness into our homes. Now we’re seeing them everywhere, even in upholstery.”
And Mr. Prugnaud seemed almost to despair. “Things are so shiny they can’t get any shinier,” he said. “We’re in an age of narcissism. People want to see themselves literally as well as metaphorically in the things they own.”
Despite such definitive statements, metallic turns out not to be the only color idea in the air. Ms. Lamb spoke of her attraction to periwinkle-hued glass vessels by Anna Torfs, a Czech designer.
“The combination of purple and gray is an established trend, but we’re nowhere near finished exploring purples,” she said. “I’m looking at red-cast blues, blue reaching out to purple.”
Meanwhile, Caroline Till, a trends analyst with the Future Laboratory, an agency based in London, discerned “a decline in patterning, with large blocks of color and bright primary accents instead.” She said, “I’m seeing a lot of green, almost acidic, primary brights and fluorescents as accent colors.”
In fact, she added: “I’ve been seeing fuchsia and lime green for a while now. They started last year as accents. Now we’re seeing them used over entire pieces, and often together. It’s fresh and contemporary.”
It is the color discussion that could lead the skeptic back to questioning trend spotting as a science. Or at least into re-examining the arty work of the observatory, and of Mr. Bernard in particular, whose white rooms seem so easy for the practical-minded trend hunter to dismiss.
Their descriptions on the fair’s Web site — “a moment of domestic re-enchantment” and “another way of dreaming one’s inner life” — sound like trade-show hokum with a French accent.
But Mr. Bernard, who has interviewed many consumers about what they want in life, is quite serious. Behind the ethereal language is an earnest trend forecast, and what may be one of the more compelling responses to a globalized, oversaturated market offered at the fair.
“I’m trying to think what will happen next year, or the next next,” he said. “There are a lot of sunny colors now, which you’ll see if you walk these halls. But in the near future, we’ll have white at home, a blank canvas on which you could write something new for the future.”
Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMitt Romney announced his withdrawal from the presidential race at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Thursday.
Evan Vucci/Associated PressMitt Romney on Thursday in Washington after announcing that he is dropping out of the presidential race.
Romney Exits, Saying He Has to ‘Stand Aside for Our Party’
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who sought to position himself as the true conservative choice for the Republican presidential nomination, announced Thursday afternoon that he had ended his campaign.
His chief rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, congratulated Mr. Romney on his efforts and reached out to conservative voters who had thrown their support to the former governor and whose support, Mr. McCain said, was “indispensable to the success of our party.”
Mr. Romney, who had vowed to press on despite disappointing results in the Super Tuesday primary contests, announced his decision to drop out at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.
In a speech that touched on the messages of his campaign, Mr. Romney said he had come to his decision to help unify the Republican Party, and he charged that Democratic candidates, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, would not pursue the war in Iraq.
“Because I love America, in this time of war, I feel I have to stand aside for our party and our country,” he said.
Mr. Romney had hoped to use Tuesday’s results to narrow Mr. McCain’s lead. Instead, he saw Mr. McCain widen the lead at the same time that Mr. Romney’s campaign lost ground to Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who racked up solid gains.
Mr. Huckabee, on his way to an appearance on “The Tyra Banks Show” in Manhattan, said Thursday afternoon that he hoped that Mr. Romney’s conservative supporters would back his campaign.
“I know that a lot of the establishment, Washington-type folks are going to be going with Senator McCain,” he said. “I understand that. but the people of this country need a choice. And right now, I am going to be their choice.”
Mr. Romney said he would have preferred to continue his campaign until the Republican convention.
“You are with me all the way to the convention,” he said before an enthusiastic crowd at the conference, hosted by the American Conservative Union. “Fight on, just like Ronald Reagan did in 1976.”
But by fighting to the convention, he said, “I’d forestall the launch of a national campaign and, frankly, I’d make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win.”
Mr. Romney faced a series of enormous challenges in the campaign, not the least of which was trying to reconcile the moderate political views he espoused as the governor of Massachusetts, a liberal state, with the more conservative views he championed on the campaign. That tension — and his decision to change positions on a number of emotionally charged issues, including renouncing his past support for abortion rights — led his rivals to continually lambaste him as a flip-flopper.
Then there was the question of his Mormon religion. After the candidacy of Mr. Huckabee, a former Baptist preacher, took off in Iowa, where it was fueled by evangelical voters, Mr. Romney was moved to give a major speech in Texas defending his faith and denouncing the rise of secularism.
And although Mr. Romney, a former management consultant, ran what many described as a textbook campaign, he never really recovered after failing to execute the original strategy of winning the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, and using those wins to build momentum. Iowa went to Mr. Huckabee, and New Hampshire to Mr. McCain, who tried to paint himself as a straight talker to contrast with Mr. Romney’s flexibility.
As the campaign progressed, Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain exchanged increasingly bitter attacks. Mr. Romney charged that Mr. McCain was “outside the mainstream of conservative political thought.” Mr. McCain pointedly noted that Mr. Romney had changed his position on important issues for many conservative Republicans, including as abortion rights and gun control.
Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference several hours after Mr. Romney, Mr. McCain sought to heal some of the wounds inflicted in the primary battle. Acknowledging the differences he had with many conservatives on such issues as immigration, Mr. McCain repeatedly said his overall political record was conservative. Before a crowd whose enthusiasm seemed to increase as his speech continued, Mr. McCain listed those of his positions — including those on abortion, gun control, tax cuts and the Iraq war — that he said were in line with conservative values.
“I am proud, very proud, to have come to public office as a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution,” he said.
Noting that the differences within the Republican Party were far smaller than those the party had with the Democratic front-runners, he called on conservative Republicans to unite in support of his campaign.
“This election is going to be about big things, not small things” he said.
Mr. Romney, in his speech, emphasized his agreement with Mr. McCain’s position that the United States needed to continue to pursue the war in Iraq. Arguing that the war is a critical part of the country’s battle against terrorism, Mr. Romney said the Democratic candidates “would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequences of that would be devastating.”
- Coping With the Caveman in the Crib
Nola Lopez
WellCoping With the Caveman in the Crib
If there is such a person as a “baby whisperer,” it is the pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp, whose uncanny ability to quiet crying babies became the best-selling book “The Happiest Baby on the Block.”
Dr. Karp’s method, endorsed by child advocates and demonstrated in television appearances and a DVD version of his book, shows fussy babies who are quickly, almost eerily soothed by a combination of tight swaddling, loud shushing and swinging, which he says mimics the sensations of the womb.
Now Dr. Karp, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles, has turned his attention to the toddler years, that explosive period of development when children learn language, motor skills and problem solving, among other things. The rapid pace at which all these changes occur is nothing short of astonishing, but it can also be overwhelming to little brains. A wailing baby is nothing compared with the defiant behavior and tantrums common among toddlers.
In his latest book, “The Happiest Toddler on the Block,” Dr. Karp tries to teach parents the skills to communicate with and soothe tantrum-prone children. In doing so, however, he redefines what being a toddler means. In his view, toddlers are not just small people. In fact, for all practical purposes, they’re not even small Homo sapiens.
Dr. Karp notes that in terms of brain development, a toddler is primitive, an emotion-driven, instinctive creature that has yet to develop the thinking skills that define modern humans. Logic and persuasion, common tools of modern parenting, “are meaningless to a Neanderthal,” Dr. Karp says.
The challenge for parents is learning how to communicate with the caveman in the crib. “All of us get more primitive when we get upset, that’s why they call it ‘going ape,’ ” Dr. Karp says. “But toddlers start out primitive, so when they get upset, they go Jurassic on you.”
Improving the ways parents cope with crying and tantrums isn’t just a matter of convenience. “The No. 1 precipitant to child abuse is the kid who cries and gets upset and doesn’t settle down and whines and whines,” says Robert Fox, professor of psychology at Marquette University and director of the behavior clinic at Penfield Children’s Center in Milwaukee. “It’s a real vulnerable situation for abuse.”
Dr. Karp’s baby program has been endorsed by several government health agencies, leaders of Prevent Child Abuse America and others. Dr. Karp will discuss his toddler program in an address to the Early Head Start program, which provides early childhood services to low-income families.
But Dr. Karp’s method of toddler communication is not for the self-conscious. It involves bringing yourself, both mentally and physically, down to a child’s level when he or she is upset. The goal is not to give in to a child’s demands, but to communicate in a child’s own language of “toddler-ese.”
This means using short phrases with lots of repetition, and reflecting the child’s emotions in your tone and facial expressions. And, most awkward, it means repeating the very words the child is using, over and over again.
For instance, a toddler throwing a tantrum over a cookie might wail, “I want it. I want it. I want cookie now.”
Often, a parent will adopt a soothing tone saying, “No, honey, you have to wait until after dinner for a cookie.”
Such a response will, almost certainly, make matters worse. “It’s loving, logical and reasonable,” notes Dr. Karp. “And it’s infuriating to a toddler. Now they have to say it over harder and louder to get you to understand.”
Dr. Karp adopts a soothing, childlike voice to demonstrate how to respond to the toddler’s cookie demands.
“You want. You want. You want cookie. You say, ‘Cookie, now. Cookie now.’ “
It’s hard to imagine an adult talking like this in a public place. But Dr. Karp notes that this same form of “active listening” is a method adults use all the time. The goal is not simply to repeat words but to make it clear that you hear someone’s complaint. “If you were upset and fuming mad, I might say, ‘I know. I know. I know. I get it. I’m really really sorry. I’m sorry.’ That sounds like gibberish out of context,” he says.
On his DVD, Dr. Karp demonstrates the method. Within seconds, teary-eyed toddlers calm and look at him quizzically as he repeats their concerns back at them. Once the child has calmed, a parent can explain the reason for saying no, offer the child comfort and a happy alternative to the original demand.
Dr. Karp also offers methods for teaching children patience, and he suggests regularly giving children small victories — like winning at a game of wrestling. “If you give them these little victories all day long, when you want them to do something for you, they’re much more likely to do it.”
Sometimes, excessive tantrums can signal an underlying health problem, so parents with a difficult child should consult with a pediatrician.
“The thing about toddlers is that they are uncivilized,” Dr. Karp says. “Our job is to civilize them, to teach them to say please and thank you, don’t spit and scratch and don’t pee anywhere you want. These are the jobs you have with a toddler.”
E-mail: well@nytimes.com.
- The Vanishing Point Current State of Fashion
Eric Johnson for The New York TimesNOW YOU SEE THEM Sascha Kooienga, left, and Artem Emelianov represent the current silhouette on the men’s wear runway
Fashion DiaryThe Vanishing Point
CREDIT Hedi Slimane or blame him. The type of men Mr. Slimane promoted when he first came aboard at Dior Homme some years back (he has since left) were thin to the point of resembling stick figures; the clothes he designed were correspondingly lean. The effects of his designs on the men’s wear industry were radical and surprisingly persuasive. Within a couple of seasons, the sleekness of Dior Homme suits made everyone else’s designs look boxy and passé, and so designers everywhere started reducing their silhouettes.
Then a funny thing happened. The models were also downsized. Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt.
Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris, where even those inured to the new look were flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of guys who looked chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished. Not altogether surprisingly, the trend has followed the fashion pack back to New York
Wasn’t it just a short time ago that the industry was up in arms about skinny models? Little over a year ago, in Spain, designers were commanded to choose models based on a healthy body mass index; physicians were installed at Italian casting calls; Diane von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, called a conference to ventilate the issue of unhealthy body imagery and eating disorders among models.
The models in question were women, and it’s safe to say that they remain as waiflike as ever. But something occurred while no one was looking. Somebody shrunk the men.
“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”
This was abundantly clear in the castings of models for New York shows by Duckie Brown, Thom Browne, Patrik Ervell, Robert Geller and Marc by Marc Jacobs, where models like Stas Svetlichnyy of Russia typified the new norm. Mr. Svetlichnyy’s top weight, he said last week, is about 145 pounds. He is 6 feet tall with a 28-inch waist.
“Designers like the skinny guy,” he said backstage last Friday at the Duckie Brown show. “It looks good in the clothes and that’s the main thing. That’s just the way it is now.”
Even in Milan last month at shows like Dolce & Gabbana and Dsquared, where the castings traditionally ran to beefcake types, the models were leaner and less muscled, more light-bodied. Just as tellingly, Dolce & Gabbana’s look-book for spring 2008 (a catalog of the complete collection) featured not the male models the label has traditionally favored — industry stars like Chad White and Tyson Ballou, who have movie star looks and porn star physiques — but men who look as if they have never seen the inside of a gym.
“The look is different from when I started in the business eight years ago,” Mr. Ballou said last week during a photo shoot at the Milk Studios in lower Manhattan. In many of the model castings, which tend to be dominated by a handful of people, the body style that now dominates is the one Charles Atlas made a career out of trying to improve.
“The first thing I did when I moved to New York was immediately start going to the gym,” the designer John Bartlett said. That was in the long-ago 1980s. But the idea of bulking up now seems retro when musicians and taste arbiters like Devendra Banhart boast of having starved themselves in order to look good in clothes.
“The eye has changed,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Clothes now are tighter and tighter. Guys are younger and younger. Everyone is influenced by what Europe shows.”
What Europe (which is to say influential designers like Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at Jil Sander) shows are men as tall as Tom Brady but who wear a size 38 suit.
“There are designers that lead the way,” said James Scully, a seasoned casting agent best known for the numerous modeling discoveries he made when he worked at Gucci under Tom Ford. “Everyone looks to Miuccia Prada for the standard the way they used to look at Hedi Slimane. Once the Hedi Slimanization got started, all anyone wanted to cast was the scrawny kid who looked like he got sand kicked in his face. The big, great looking models just stopped going to Europe. They knew they’d never get cast.”
For starters, they knew that they would never fit into designers’ samples. “When I started out in the magazine business in 1994, the sample size was an Italian 50,” said Long Nguyen of Flaunt magazine, referring to a size equivalent to a snug 40-regular.
“That was an appropriate size for a normal 6-foot male,” Mr. Nguyen said. Yet just six years later — coincidentally at about the time Mr. Slimane left his job as the men’s wear designer at YSL for Dior Homme — the typical sample size had dwindled to 48. Now it is 46.
“At that point you might as well save money and just go over to the boy’s department,” Mr. Nguyen said from his seat in the front row of the Benjamin Cho show, which was jammed as usual with a selection of reedy boys in Buffalo plaid jackets and stovepipe jeans, the same types that fill Brooklyn clubs like Sugarland. “I’m not really sure if designers are making clothes smaller or if people are smaller now,” Mr Nguyen said.
According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans are taller and much heavier today than 40 years ago. The report, released in 2002, showed that the average height of adult American men has increased to 5-9 ½ in 2002 from just over 5-8 in 1960. The average weight of the same adult man had risen dramatically, to 191 pounds from 166.3.
Nowadays a model that weighed in at 191 pounds, no matter how handsome, would be turned away from most agencies or else sent to a fat farm.
Far from inspiring a spate of industry breast-beating, as occurred after the international news media got hold of the deaths of two young female models who died from eating disorders, the trend favoring very skinny male models has been accepted as a matter or course.
“I personally think that it’s the consumer that’s doing this, and fashion is just responding,” said Kelly Cutrone, the founder of People’s Revolution, a fashion branding and production company. “No one wants a beautiful women or a beautiful man anymore.”
In terms of image, the current preference is for beauty that is not fully evolved. “People are afraid to look over 21 or make any statement of what it means to be adult,” Ms. Cutrone said.
George Brown, a booking agent at Red Model Management, said: “When I get that random phone call from a boy who says, ‘I’m 6-foot-1 and I’m calling from Kansas,’ I immediately ask, ‘What do you weigh?’ If they say 188 or 190, I know we can’t use him. Our guys are 155 pounds at that height.”
Their waists, like that of Mr. Svetlichnyy, measure 28 or 30 inches. They have, ideally, long necks, pencil thighs, narrow shoulders and chests no more than 35.5 inches in circumference, Mr. Brown said. “It’s client driven,” he added. “That’s just the size that blue-chip designers and high-end editorials want.”
For Patrik Ervell’s show on Saturday, the casting brief called for new faces and men whose bodies were suited to a scarecrow silhouette. “We had to measure their thighs,” Mr. Brown said.
For models like Demián Tkach, a 26-year-old Argentine who was recently discovered by the photographer Bruce Weber, the tightening tape measure may cut off a career.
Mr. Tkach said that when he came here from Mexico, where he had been working: “My agency asked me to lose some muscle. I lost a little bit to help them, because I understand the designers are not looking for a male image anymore. They’re looking for some kind of androgyne.”
- Darkness and Light Maureen Dowd Decision 2008
Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesMaureen Dowd
Op-Ed ColumnistDarkness and Light
LOS ANGELES
Hillary Clinton denounced Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, but she did not absorb the ultimate lesson of the destructive vice president:
Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.
I think Hillary truly believes that she and Bill are the only ones tough enough to get to the White House. Jack Nicholson endorsed her as “the best man for the job,” and she told David Letterman that “in my White House, we’ll know who wears the pantsuits.” But her pitch is the color of pitch: Because she has absorbed all the hate and body blows from nasty Republicans over the years, she is the best person to absorb more hate and body blows from nasty Republicans.
Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.
“I think we should never be derisive about somebody who has the ability to inspire,” Senator McCaskill told David Gregory on MSNBC on Tuesday. “You know, we’ve had some dark days in this democracy over the last seven years, and today the sun is out. It is shining brightly. I watch these kids, these old and young, these black and white, 20,000 of them, pour into our dome in St. Louis Saturday night, and they feel good about being an American right now. And I think that’s something that we have to capture.”
Tuesday’s voting showed only that the voters, like moviegoers, don’t want a pat ending. Even though Hillary reasserted her strength, corraling New York, California and Kennedy country Massachusetts, she and Obama will battle on in chiaroscuro. Her argument to the Democratic base has gone from a subtext of “You owe me,” or more precisely, “Bill owes me and you owe him,” to a subtext of “Obambi will fold at the first punch from the right.”
Hillary’s strategist Mark Penn argued last week that because the voters have “very limited information” about Obama, the Republican attack machine would tear him down and he would lose the support of independents. Then Penn tried to point the way to negative information on Obama, just to show that Obama wouldn’t be able to survive Republicans pointing the way to negative information.
As she talked Sunday to George Stephanopoulos, a former director of the formidable Clinton war room, Hillary’s case boiled down to the fact that she can be Trouble, as they say about hard-boiled dames in film noir, when Republicans make trouble.
“I have been through these Republican attacks over and over and over again, and I believe that I’ve demonstrated that much to the dismay of the Republicans, I not only can survive, but thrive,” she said.
And on Tuesday night she told supporters, “Let me be clear: I won’t let anyone Swift-boat this country’s future.”
Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.
Bill is propelled by Cheneyesque paranoia, as well. His visceral reaction to Obama — from the “fairy tale” line to the inappropriate Jesse Jackson comparison — is rooted less in his need to see his wife elected than in his need to see Obama lose, so that Bill’s legacy is protected. If Obama wins, he’ll be seen as the closest thing to J. F. K. since J. F. K. And J. F. K. is Bill’s hero.
For much of the campaign, when matched against Hillary in debates, the Illinois senator seemed out of his weight class. But he has moved up to heavyweight, even while losing five pounds as he has raced around the country. The big question is: Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic? Will he have the muscle to take on the opposition, from Billary to the Republican hate machine to the terrorists overseas?
“I try to explain to people, I may be skinny but I’m tough,” he told a crowd of more than 15,000 in Hartford the other night, with the Kennedys looking on. “I’m from Chicago.”
The relentless Hillary has been the reticent Obama’s tutor in the Political School for Scandal. He is learning how to take a punch and give one back. When she presents her mythic narrative, the dragon she has slain is the Republican attack machine. Obama told me he doesn’t think about mythic narratives, and Tuesday night in Chicago he was reaching up for “a hymn that will heal this nation and repair the world.”
But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.
