Events - Part 31

 Fashion Shows

We've already seen how fashion designers like to use naked men in their advertising.  Well, it seems that they and their customers like to see naked men in other contexts, too.  Above is the cover of the spring 2015 issue of Man About Town, a men's fashion magazine.

The cover and an article inside (above) had little or nothing to do with fashion.  It was an excuse to show naked photos of model Michael Morgan.

But I digress.  Today's post is part of my series about events, and in the fashion world, the big events are the fashion shows where designers show off their latest collections, with models strutting down the runway past an audience of prospective customers. This is designer Louis Gabriel Nouchi's spring-summer 2023 collection, with model Jordan wearing a robe that teases us but doesn't quite expose him.

During the Paris Men's Fashion Week, 2015, designer Rick Owens went a step further with designs that were deliberately cut away to expose the penis.  Would anyone wear this in public?  Of course not, but a lot of high-end fashion designs are created to make a name for the designer, not to be actually worn.

Here's another of Rick Owens' cutaway designs.

Here, it looked like a designer had gone even further, with model Lucas Fernandes wearing nothing but shoes and socks.

However, a little digging showed that the photo was a photoshopped fake.  Designer Amir Slama's spring-summer 2017 show featured some rather brief briefs (above).  I must say the photoshopped version was quite realistic and very well done.

Above we see the end of Frankie Morello's men's fashion show for fall-winter 2012.  Here the model really did get totally naked, but people only saw a rear view, right?

Wrong.  There were people sitting to the left and right of the runway, and someone got this shot of model Giuseppe Sartori as he walked back.

But for sheer male nakedness at a fashion show, nothing beats this 2005 show in Madrid with a collection of women's handbags carried by naked men.  This show is somewhat of a mystery – nobody seems to know who the designer was, and the usual audience of buyers was absent – but it seems too elaborate to be a fake, and the flashes of light indicate that photographers were present.

The video is somewhat long (2 minutes and 41 seconds), and I was going to crop it to a representative sample.  Then I thought, maybe you won't complain about having to look at attractive naked men for 2 minutes and 41 seconds.

Update: Thanks to Laurent, the mystery is solved.  This was not a regular fashion show.  Loewe, a Spanish luxury fashion house, held a party and commissioned artists to celebrate their 160th anniversary.  Artist Alicia Framis created this "fashion show" as performance art, featuring real handbags from Loewe's 2005 collection being carried by naked men.  The work is called June 8th Free the Models.  So, it's a combination of fashion show and art exhibit.

Check out Laurent's blog Workmen and Rednecks.  Thanks, Laurent!