It’s actually in London and it’s certainly one of the most interesting exhibition about menswear fashion and photography. Mad About The Boy explores fashion’s obsession with youth, focusing on the way ideas of the teenage boy are constructed through specific collections and fashion images.
Sparked by the success of designers like Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent, Raf Simons and Gosha Rubchinskiy – all of whom seem to share a fixation with youth culture – the exhibition sets out to examine the tropes and parallels within fashion’s treatment of youth, unpicking the many notions of the young male that feature in fashion’s imagination, from outsider to sexual fantasy to reveller.
Curator Lou Stoppard said being interested in different ideas of youth and the show is set out in different themes. “Youth is something that transforms generation by generation, but I felt in fashion, particularly by the early 1970s, the treatment of youth has been so cyclical,” says Lou Stoppard.
The exhibition presents the work of a variety of designers and image-makers such as Alasdair McLellan, Jason Evans or Gosha Rubchinskiy. With current but as well select examples from the 1980s and 1990s, for whom the boy provides a constant source of inspiration.
Mad About The Boy is at Fashion Space Gallery, London, from 8 January to2 April 2016.
