The cheek of it
Young men have always dressed to shock. Yet there is something uniquely strange about today's acres of underclad bottoms, says William Sutcliffe
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Saturday December 17, 2005
The Guardian
[/FONT]It is a sunny day. I am sitting outside a cafe in north London, watching the world go by. I don't yet know it, but my world is about to change. The boundaries of the possible are about to be redrawn. The instigator is a young white guy who, from a distance, looks a shade thuggish, but is otherwise utterly unremarkable. It is only as he gets closer that I realise what he has to show me.
It's his belt-line. I've seen them low before; everyone has. But this is different. This is special. From the front, at first you just think, "That's low." You also think, "That's a lot of pant. Several inches." The subconscious scientist in you even asks, "How does that stay up?" But, as he passes by and I am treated to the rear view, I realise that I have entered a whole new world. His belt is below the buttocks. At the front, the belt appears to be resting on his penis. From there it slopes downwards and is pulled taut against the backs of his thighs.
Allow me to clarify. This is the outfit. Neck to waist: T-shirt. Waist to genitalia/anus: underpant. Genitalia to ankles: jeans. The notion of an undergarment has been jettisoned. The pant is out there. The buttocks are all but open to the wind. Both cheeks. Top to bottom. For the trouser, this is truly a new low.
Five minutes after I witness this curious display, it happens again; this time it is a black guy. Two unconnected incidents, four buttocks on display in the street, shielded from view by nothing more than a thin veil of designer underpant.
Men's belts and backsides have had a close cooperative relationship for hundreds, if not thousands, of years - the latter supported the former. Now the roles seem to be switching. The cart, if you like, is being put before the horse. If this sounds implausible, I urge men to try it. You need a baggy pair of trousers and a long belt. Seemingly against the laws of physics, the trousers will stay up. It is a little uncomfortable, since the weight of the trousers is chiefly borne by the penis, but as long as you don't attempt any sudden bursts of speed, your trousers will not fail you. Though what you have to lose if your trousers do drop is not entirely clear, since everything is already on display anyway. Having achieved the look, I walked downstairs (which was not easy and caused some chafing) to show my wife. She was unimpressed. In fact, she laughed loudly, at length, then told me my pants were too cheap.
One further point needs clarifying. The display I witnessed was not near any fashionable or gay area. These were not, I am sure, gay men. Though the clothes were screaming, "Look at my ****!" the manner and face of both men were saying, defiantly, "What do you think you're looking at?" Indeed, the low belt-line has been pioneered by rap musicians and urban American black culture, notorious for homophobic machismo. You have to look at the source of this fashion to understand what is really going on. In the late 70s and 80s, gay culture began to co-opt machismo. Bands such as the Village People dressed up as hunks while prancing like queens, and the handlebar moustache and lumberjack shirt were never the same again. Machismo was queered. Even muscles became somehow a little bit gay. Straight fear of gayness allowed gay men to dictate straight fashions. If gay men started growing moustaches, straight men sprinted for their razors. When gay men wore tight trousers, straight men swiftly adopted a baggier style.
Since the early 90s, heterosexual men have avoided tight trousers. But now, it seems, with tentative bravado, urban black culture is fighting back and reclaiming the buttocks from the gays. The clothes are still baggy but, thanks to that descending belt, for the first time in 15 years the straight behind is daring to show its curves in public. The subtext of the look is, I suspect, a defiantly macho, "Look, I'm so heterosexual that I can display my **** in public without feeling gay." There is a logic at work here. If you accept the argument that conventional straight fashion is running scared from gay fashion, it follows that the most macho way you can dress is to display that you are not susceptible to that fear. In other words, the best way to show that you have no fear of gayness is to dress gay.
Some fashions trickle down to the high street from the catwalk. Others climb up to the catwalk from the street. When it comes to the low belt-line, there are two rival theories as to its inception. The trickle-down theory credits Alexander McQueen's "bumster" trousers, which in the mid-90s set the trend for a descending belt. Others trace the look to US prisons, where one of the first things that happens is your belt is taken away. Prisoners, as a result, wear their trousers low. From here, via gangster chic, the look spread all the way to suburban "wiggas" - white men who mimic black urban culture. This is what makes the fashion so hard to interpret. When a man goes low, he could either be imitating a gay designer's haute couture, or aspiring to the condition of an ex-con. Messages don't come more mixed.
Luke Day, fashion director of Attitude, the gay lifestyle magazine, believes these apparent opposites can happily coexist and have done for a while. "A fashion can easily be gay and macho at the same time," he says. Nor is this a new phenomenon. Gay men may have taken tight jeans to new extremes in the 80s but, at the same time, Day points out, Axl Rose was fond of strutting his stuff in white Lycra cycling shorts. Gay culture and macho culture have one important thing in common - both groups are more interested in impressing other men than in appealing to women. And the low belt certainly doesn't appear to be a look designed to turn on women. Therapist and sex columnist Emma Gold isn't alone among women in asserting, "Men who wear their trousers like this look ridiculous. It's very unsexy and doesn't flatter a man's **** at all." Gold's opinion is that, as it became acceptable in recent years for a woman's bra to be visible, men simply wanted to get in on the act of underwear display. And, men being men, they have competitively pushed it as far as it will go.
