Why Do Designers Keep Taking Off Their Clothes? An Investigation

You might say we live in a post-trend world, where the general fracturing of culture means that giant flares can be popular concurrently with the skinniest trouser. But once in a while, a trend still manages to calcify into a movement, and sweeps the industry. That’s what’s happening now, at least among a handful of the biggest-name designers in fashion.. And for an industry (allegedly) about clothes, this new trend in fact involves very little clothing at all. Prominent fashion designers simply cannot stop taking their clothes off. The flood began, innocently enough, with the portraits of Matthew Williams that Givenchy circulated upon the announcement of his new role as creative director. In two images, he wore a crisp shirt and tie: a man ready to start a new job. But the most widely shared featured the designer shirtless, adjusting his chains and baring his tattoos: a man preparing for a role rather than arrogantly assuming it. Designers tend to look pensive, professional, and a little buttoned-up in such official portraits, so Williams’s—taken by Paolo Roversi, known for intimately shot, romantic closeups—were a chucking of the gauntlet, so to speak, indicating that he had something else up his sleeve. (Or, indeed, that he had no sleeve at all.) Read more at GQ.