ABSTRACT
In contrast to Diva, Attitude can play with a male relationship to fashion that is clearly eroticized and fantastic and can, presumably, draw on what Mort identifies as the homosocial spaces and reading habits previously constructed by the men’s style press of the 1980s (Mort, 1996). There is little recourse to authenticity or documentary in these examples from Atti tude (Figure 4). The splendour of the dressed male figure is more closely akin to the unobtainable glamour of the supermodel, whilst the eroticization of the model is made abundantly clear in the regular inclusion of fashion editorial for perfume ‘Heaven Scent’ (centre left Figure 4). In this instance, the erotic takes precedence. As Simpson observes, it is perfume/aftershave adverts in the mainstream media that have produced the most overt and narcissistic objectification of the naked male torso. But where homoeroticized perfume adverts in the mainstream produce a troublingly queer ambivalence in which the homoerotic desire for the male body must be to some extent disavowed (Simpson, 1994), their presence as editorial in Attitude produces the erotic as the dominant meaning: an unproblematic source of pleasure.
