Fall Winter 2006/2007: Vincent Gallo

photographer TERRY RICHARDSON featuring VINCENT GALLO   This year’s winter collections are all about the new austerity: hidden beauty, solemn opulence, as well as sexual isolation, solitude—reserved even when they’re revealing, masculine even when they’re feminine. Men’s cuts and religious or military influences haven’t been adapted for women so much as re-assigned. Here, dressed in women’s clothing, actor-film maker-musician Vincent Gallo reinforces these gender-appropriating trends—aggressively displaying these feminine clothes as the remnants of authority figures, clerics, judges, and military figures. It’s not the New Romantics, not David Bowie make-up and lizard-like costumes, not hair bands like Queen, or the salad days of disco, but more like the unlikely masculinity of Louis XIV in high-heels and frills, or the couples of Argentinean men who dance the tango—a verifiable toughness that comes through despite, or maybe because of, feminine outfits. Maybe this masculine/feminism is redefining identity—the radical assimilation of masculine and feminist…