Jolie Laide

Look on any runway and you will come to an obvious conclusion: beauty is no longer chic.

Why are so many of today's models weird looking? Calling some of them unconventional would be generous. Even attractive models, such as Magdalena Frackowiak (below), are pretty in a highly stylized fashion mostly foreign to Hollywood.

Theories abound, but none satisfy. The most common explanation is that designers purposefully choose models whose looks will not compete with the product. But that would mean plain and nondescript models, when in fact a flip through any fashion magazine turns up a sea of striking faces. Most ad campaigns today feature fifteen year old Slavs with haunted, gigantic eyes. Ukrainian model Masha Tyelna epitomizes this look with her impossibly large, extraterrestrial peepers.

It's hard to believe Tylena's face is the product of nature, not Photoshop.

Another argument is that designers only select for bodies, not faces. The same criticism applies. By all counts, the industry actively picks faces that will grab attention, not shrink from it.

My theory: the unconventional look now in vogue says more about our current culture than it does about the fashion industry and its preferences. Beauty is edgeless, commercial, and worst of all -- dated.

The evolution of model beauty mirrors a sped-up version of the history of modern art.

The disownment of beauty is nothing new to art. As early as the turn of the twentieth century, artists rebelled against the notion that all art must be beautiful. The Cubists, the Dadaists, Stravinsky, and many later art movements defied the longstanding association between art and beauty with such success that, according to art critic Arthur Danto, “beauty had disappeared not only from the advanced art of the 1960’s but from the advanced philosophy of art of that decade as well."

For the most part, the art world never looked back. Modern art contains much that is shocking, ugly or spare but few straightforwardly beautiful images untinged by irony. Traditional beauty is too easy. Art these days is anything but easy.

It was inevitable that the fashion world, with its artistic aspirations, would follow suit and flirt with the "ugly-beauty" aesthetic, or as the French call it "jolie-laide." The movement reached a shocking peak five years ago with the androgynous faces of Omahyra Mota and Adina Fohlin. Their brazenly ugly mugs were as much of a flip off to tradition as the avant-garde clothes they modelled. On the more feminine end of the modeling spectrum were the "bugs"/"aliens" like Gemma Ward and Lily Cole.

Most recently a quieter anti-beauty trend has emerged. The new girls flooding from Supreme Management's doors are too plain and ordinary to register on a Richter scale. Models like Daiane Conterato, Lera Sheremeta and Meghan Collison (pictured below, top to bottom) resemble instead the willowy wallflowers who hover on the fringes of teenage society. Supreme plays up their edginess with grimy polaroids and messy hair.

The industry's embrace of non-faces may be its most daring statement yet. Even when glorifying ugliness, the industry has never betrayed its elite soul. Somebody like Omahyra Mota might not win a beauty pageant, but she certainly commands attention. The mere fact that she stands out makes her elite and unattainable, which sums up the image fashion has always sold. But stand out is exactly what these girls don't do. So why their appeal to designers?

It's all about negative space. Like a minimalist, abstract piece of art, the spare, common face permits projection of absent beauty.

You feel smarter and cooler being part of the club that "gets" such a face. If, looking at these girls, you don't see anything immediately noteworthy, you assume there must be a hook hidden beneath the surface which explains their popularity. It's the kind of coolness that feeds on itself. If their appeal isn't skin deep, it's clothing, hair and attitude deep, an apparently important distinction to those in the know.

But even the least attractive models lack a realism found in the ugly beauty of modern art. There's a distinction between fashionable ugliness and gritty realism. Fashion is, after all, an industry, and ugly doesn't sell. Using "carnie folk" as designer John Galliano does in his shows may be an interesting artistic spectacle, but it doesn't sell clothes. Irony works only when it has a convention to screw with. These models make plain faces or bad hair look hip because they belong to skinny, tall, young bodies. If models really looked like everything usually attached to bad hair, there would be no irony.