“Big breasts are popular, people look around, they say, ‘Oh … they’re scary … I’m going to vote for Buchanan …’
“Conversely, like in the ’60s, you had people like Penelope Tree and Twiggy, and people looked around and said . . . ‘It’s OK, it’s safe. I’m going to join a commune and take drugs’.”
Of all the unsung forces that swept Bill Clinton into the presidency, this is among the most deservedly unsung. Yet all the same, the year’s splashiest groundswell for ideological change rumbled not in stump speeches but in the scented pages of fashion magazines. There, a new vision of America is unfolding. It is a slimmer, more dissipated vision, with just a touch of makeup around the vacant eyes-an America safe for joining communes or electing Democratic presidents. As Geri Richter, who books the models for Allure magazine, says, “This is the age of the Jean Shrimpton type of model.”
Toppled, at least for the moment, are the curvaceous supermodels who reigned over two Republican administrations: the Cindy Crawfords, the Claudia Schiffers. In their place are their opposites, yang to their yin: reedy, boyish women with hollow curves and sinewy lines. Elizabeth Tilberis, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar, calls them “angelic little boys.” Just five months after America celebrated the magnificent, muscular figures of Olympic athletes like Gail Devers and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, we find ourselves awash in figures of another order. They are known as “the gamines”: small, frail-looking throwbacks in cheesy ’70s weeds. Consider, for example, the January issue of Harper’s Bazaar. Staring out from the cover, wan and disengaged, are Meghan Douglas, Kate Moss and Patricia Hartmann-three new superstars, and not enough figure among them to make a fingerprint. On the back cover, in triplicate, the angular, androgynous Kristen McMenamy models a triad of garish, plunging Gianni Versace get-ups that show off her lack of curves.
The new crew are as austere as the times. Their torsos, their features, their complexions, their eyes-all feel as though they have yet to blossom, potential untapped. Clothes fall off them, color won’t stick to them. Their signature hairstyle is the penitentiary scruff of Lucie de La Falaise: chopped, ruffled, sometimes unwashed. Rising as human coat hangers for the shapeless fashion that’s hopelessly dubbed grunge, they are no-frills icons for the Gap age. (Even if their austere look can now earn them more than $10,000 a day.) For a generation just now generating its own marijuana culture-seen most visibly in the ubiquitous Phillies Blunt T shirts, which flash the new slang for joints-the gamines and their hippie threads provide a link with the past.
Foremost among the gamines is Moss, 18, best known for her topless Calvin Klein ads with the rapper Marky Mark. Discovered at the age of 14 in an airport lounge, the British Moss is just 5 feet 7, with shoulders you could fit through a wedding band. We’d describe her as four straight limbs in search of a woman’s body, a mini-bosom trapped in perpetual puberty, the frail torso of the teenage choirboy-except that NEWSWEEK already used this prose to describe Twiggy back in 1962.
But the true comer in the bunch might be McMenamy. Her hair hacked down to her scalp, her eyebrows plucked, she doesn’t just lack the supermodel’s stylization of gender; she negates it. Even her sex is in doubt. When the Moss-Marky Mark ads run out of steam, she’ll be the next face and figure of Calvin Klein. And like Moss and the rest, she was not put on this earth to nurture. When she works, she told Harper’s Bazaar, “the only way I can get through is by saying ‘F— you’ over and over in my head.”
Within the fashion industry, the line on the new, slimmer line is that it marks a return to reality after the artifice of the ’80s. It’s also a reaction against the hazards of silicone implants, the lethal side of bionic excess. “It’s down to earth,” says Richter. The models don’t wear much makeup, they don’t wear good clothes, they don’t play their sexuality at louder-than-life volume. They’re not perfect, not what Richter calls “very done.” Anyone could be one. (To which Wayne and Garth might reply: “As if!”)
But if being beautiful isn’t democratic, it is political. The ’80s supermodels acted out certain stock representations of femininity-fitting for a decade in which, as Susan Faludi writes in “Backlash … the beauty industry belonged to the cultural loop that produced backlash feedback” against feminist progress. The gamines withdraw from these strict roles. The waif is pure potential; she can be anything.
In fashion as in politics, the tides cycle. Even now, Vogue has a session in the works with Schiffer. Today’s glamorous gamines could be rocking the Lands’ End catalog circuit tomorrow. But if nothing else, they’ll leave a lasting lesson for the body politic. In the afterglow of the year of the woman, the ascent of these sere types proves that men and their appetites really don’t run the world.
“I wasn’t surprised by the body’ types,” says Katie Ford, vice president of the high-powered Ford Model Agency. “But I was by the fashion … It’s very recently retro. People, baby boomers, wore similar clothes within our memories.”
The gamines owe much of their unlikely good fortune to the equally unlikely rise of grunge fashion, a deliberately shabby, unconstructed neo ’70s look loosely derived from scruffy Seattle rock bands like Pearl Jam. An eclectic mess of combat boots, flannel shirts, exposed midriff and clashing layers, grunge is the latest style to ascend from the streets to the runways-with an attendant haut price tag. Marc Jacobs, chief designer for Perry Ellis and “guru of grunge,” gave his models greasy hair before marching them out in November in his spring look of Birkenstock sandals, torn jersey dresses, hotpants and plaid shirts (tied around the waist, naturally). Calvin Klein, Anna Sui, Christian Francis Roth and even Ralph Lauren took similarly slack turns.
The slacker couture, widely (and unquestioningly) hyped as the in look for spring, has yet to be tested before the American public, which may not be ready to fork over 155 bucks for a flannel shirt from DKNY. Also, there’s the silliness factor. Grunge fashion, like grunge rock, presents itself as a backlash against ’80s materialism: in 1993 the fantasy factory produces fashions, figures and looks no one could covet. But if this is populism, Seventh Avenue can keep it. The Seattle rockers, who honed their look in the house of Kmart, are amused by its sudden cachet. As Pearl Jam bassist Jeff Ament told Harper’s Bazaar, “A lot of people, myself included, won’t even wear flannel because it’s this total hip thing.” Ah, purity. Even in these down-to-earth times, it has no truck with fashion. But we’ll still love Seattle for its coffee. And we’ll turn to streets other than Seventh Avenue for our fashion tips.
