When You’re a Boy: Men’s Fashion Styled by Simon Foxton
We are often so intimated by the proliferation of seemingly perfect male fashion models that dominate magazines that we rarely question what is going on behind the photograph. A new exhibition focussing on the career of legendary stylist Simon Hoxton sheds new light on a secret creative process, laying bare the intricacies of the construction of some of the images that inflect both our consumer practices and our play with masculine personas.
Foxton began his career in the early 1980s and has since become the leading image-maker of men’s fashion, one of the few men able to anticipate and react to radical shifts in menswear design. The images featured in this show chart his career through the eyes of three major fashion photographers: Nick Knight, Jason Evans and Alasdair McLellan. Each depict a different, ground breaking aspect of his career, portraying his evolution as a thinker and the creation of some of the most iconic pieces presented in contemporary magazines.
It is the stylist’s contribution that is of the real interest here, the decisions that have gone in to choosing poses that are abundant with vibrant colour, an urban energy and often provocative, sexually charged statement.
Three separate walls, each devoted to a partnership with a photographer, offer rare glimpses into this most intimate of creative relationships. Foxton’s collaboration with Knight is characterised by an attempt to reinvent the idols of British culture such as punks and skinheads.
The imaginative process is often inflected with explosions of radical colour such as in From War, a landscape showing an array of muscle-bound black models in mock combat against a backdrop of exploding red paint. Flirtation with gay sub-cultural reference abounds, with the use of leather chaps, canes and gloves.
Performative group scenes dominate later prints by Jason Evans which resonate with an engaging playfulness. The highlight here is the series Strictly, focussing on black models adorned in nineteenth century inspired English suits against urban backdrops. The juxtaposition is ingenious, prompting us to question our interpretations of dialogues between ethnicity, Englishness and masculinity.
Since 2001, Foxton has worked with Alasdair McLellan, producing portraits with a heavily reliance on the body. Summoning up spectres of boyhood and classicism, these are imbued with a thoughtfully restrained homoeroticism. The World Won’t Listen is a merciless close-up of a young skinhead, the sweat pouring from his skin, his mouth agape with a semblance of considered anguish.
The centre-piece consists of the scrap books that Foxton has compiled since 1981, a series of cuttings from pornographic and ethnographic studies. Viewing these alongside his body of work provides an invaluable insight into the ideas that have influenced the often humorous, irreverent yet always inspired iconography that surrounds us.
