The Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once said of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”
The justice would certainly be able to see this one.
At the Fashion Awards in London on Monday, Elias Medini, the fashion influencer known as Lyas, walked onto the red carpet wearing a Jean Paul Gaultier bodysuit printed from neck to ankle with the disconcertingly realistic image of a naked man.
At a quick glance it appeared that Mr. Medini had himself gone full frontal, that he had groomed his chest hair into a shaggy T-shape and was ready for an especially nippy night out. But no, it was just a stretchy facsimile. A hirsute suit plastered with the image of a well-endowed man that, in any other capacity, would have arrived with an age restriction. (We cannot print the outfit in full here for obvious reasons.)
Mr. Medini’s nothing-to-the-imagination outfit garnered groans and guffaws online. On Instagram, where many accounts have blurred out the R-rated bits, comments ranged from aghast to grossed out. Several keyboard critics claimed it was closer to costume than fashion. (That the outfit bunched and wrinkled like a store-bought latex suit added only to the Spirit Halloween vibes.)
Yet, still, the likes poured in. Thousands of them by Tuesday morning. What’s more, Mr. Medini’s outfit reached terminal velocity, breaking the airspace of the fashion internet to be posted by mainstream pop culture publications. On the celebrity blog Just Jared, you can read about Mr. Medini’s suit, squeezed between “Avatar 3” early reactions and a recap of Alexander Skarsgard’s appearance on “The Graham Norton Show.”
None of this — the astonishment, the attention, the base provocation of it all — should surprise anyone who has paid attention to celebrity style in the past decade.
The red carpet has become a “Gladiator” arena where stars chuck out lamé and silk high jinks to become the most discussed outfit of the evening. To be memed is better than to be praised.
Consider how many outfits in the past few years have been tailored to scoop up headlines: Kylie Jenner’s fabricated lion’s head, Zendaya in her metallic Mugler robot suit and Lil Nas X wearing a headpiece the size of a flying saucer. Were these good outfits? That’s the wrong question.
But so often, the quest for attention has manifested in nudity. We continue to bask (some would say wallow) in the “naked dressing” trend, propelling celebrities like Bella Hadid, Florence Pugh, Ciara and Kim Kardashian to take to the red carpet in dresses that barely obscure their breasts behind the most gossamer of fabrics.
At this year’s Grammy Awards, Ye’s wife Bianca Censori took this trend to its limit, wearing a see-through slip that exposed her chest and genitalia. (So pervasive has this trend become that the Cannes Film Festival instituted a dress code prohibiting nudity on the red carpet.)
But Mr. Medini’s outfit illuminates the inequity of skin on the red carpet. Yes, Mr. Medini is brandishing a naked body, but, critically, it is not his body. It is a borrowed body. A provocation that doesn’t actually put one’s own anatomical honesty out there. Duran Lantink, the Dutch designer who is now creative director of Jean Paul Gaultier, appears preoccupied with tacked-on body manipulation. The last collection of his own label opened with a female model in a male torso appendage and closed with a male model wearing a rubbery set of women’s breasts.
Naked dressing may be a trend, but it is a trend that has almost entirely been perpetuated by women, not men. Consider that when Ms. Censori wore her all-out-there dress at the Grammy Awards, Ye was beside her, covered up in a modest black tee and black jeans.
While a male star may show some skin occasionally — Mr. Skarsgard in a backless Ludovic de Saint Sernin shirt or Brad Pitt in a flouncy skirt — they largely flash “safe” amounts of skin. The male erogenous zones, those that simmer with R-rated provocation, remain off limits. Or at least served up in latex form only.
Yet the lesson of Mr. Medini’s outfit may be that nudity, even artificial nudity still works. Here is a figure who you most likely didn’t even know about until today. And now he has Us Weekly writing about him. That his outfit has been covered on mainstream cultural properties, that I’m even writing this very piece, shows that in the attention economy, there are no gold stars for good taste.
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
The post And the Award for Most Cynical Look Goes to … the Naked Suit appeared first on New York Times.
