Exhibition Text: Mad About The Boy

Mad About The Boy explores fashion’s obsession with the young male, focusing on the way ideas of the teenage boy are constructed through specific collections and images. It presents the work of a variety of designers and photographers – current as well as select examples from the seventies, eighties and nineties – who have shaped fashion’s ideal of the young male or for whom the boy provides a constant source of inspiration.

Fashion has long been preoccupied with youth – from its preferred lithe body shape to the consistent and unwavering references to subcultures and street movements. Although the teenage years are both a time of transformation and open to reinterpretation themselves, generation by generation, year by year, fashion’s relationship with youth is cyclical and repetitive – the same tropes and signatures appear regularly: school, fandom, gangs, firsts. Established creative practitioners, reflecting on their own youth, often draw on the same ideals as new graduates for whom a youthful existence is a reality. It is these recurrent themes that are explored here.

While this exhibition approaches ideals of the young male through eight distinct sections – hangouts, rebellion, gender fluidity, sexual exploration, street culture, education, revelry, and the line between boy and man – there are common threads that run through all depictions of the boy. The fluidity and possibility of the teenage years seem to unite fashion’s preoccupations, sparked, perhaps, by a strange belief in the precious genius of youth – a time of infinite opportunity and spontaneous, innate coolness, mixed with liberating naivety. Designers, young and old, return to these notions, constructing, rehashing and shaping the dream male, season in, season out.