Model Behaviour

While the look of what defines masculinity may be slow to change, French model, actor and artist Paul Hameline remains one of the key forces in the evolution of the male form on modern runways. From the rise of androgyny to embracing a gentler side, Vogue Man delves into the changing narrative of menswear.

- GORDON NG

Despite its size and complexities, the fashion industry is very often reduced to its most glamorous aspects. The players at the highest end—namely luxury brands, though their methods have filtered down to almost every level of the scale—trade on a degree of fantasy and aspiration. At the quiet heart of this lie models, an indispensable element of the industry. On the high and fancy end, models wear the clothes and accessories on the runway, becoming the corporeal embodiment of designers’ creative visions. They star in glossy advertising campaigns, photos splashed across magazine pages and videos played online. On the commercial, more functional side, they wear the clothes that you look at online to consider buying, their persons offering an example (with varying levels of relatability insofar as models are, by design, good-looking) of how things will look on the body.

The word model being applied to a person only really began to take off in the 1800s when the British couturier Charles Frederick Worth showed his designs on actual women. The field has changed a lot since then. Fashion shows—those all-important staged events watched far and wide—are far from the trade happenings they used to be. They are now for public entertainment—if not in person, then certainly online, where brands have made live streaming a common practice. It’s certainly one of the biggest stages for a model to get seen and noticed, and some bookings—Prada, for example—have been proven blue-chip career jumpstarts for years.