In 2008, in what must have been a rotten month for news, Forbes magazine saw fit to rank the world's 10 most successful male models.
Number one was Taylor Fuchs, who once modelled in a Pringle campaign. Next was Mathias Lauridsen, who modelled for Hugo Boss and Gucci. In third was Matt Gordon, a catwalk regular for Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano.
That's probably more than you need to know about any of them because apart from the obvious – chiselled looks – these three young men have only one thing in common: I haven't heard of any of them. And that's kind of the point with male models, isn't it?
The names of female supermodels trip off the tongue as easily as they trip over their 13-inch stack wedges, but half a decade on from that Forbes list (with the possible exception of our old friend David Gandy) you'd still struggle to name a single male model, super or otherwise.
Broadly, this is a good thing. Who needs another set of no-marks to add to the army of WAGs and former reality show contestants doing the rounds? But there is one male model who deserves a little limelight – the man who can reasonably be said to have started it all: Angelo Vittucci. In 1952, at a couture show in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, he became the world's first male catwalk model when he stepped out wearing suits by Italian fashion house Brioni.
Dig around on the web and you can even find pictures of this historic occasion. One shows Vittucci padding down a runway in the chandelier bedecked Florentine ballroom, resplendent in a natty three-piece suit. In another he's wearing an overcoat and walking with a female model. There's footage, too, which shows him stooping to kiss a proffered hand in the front row – it probably wasn't attached to Barbara Cartland, but it's fun to think it could have been – and letting someone else cop a feel of the cloth in a never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width sort of way.
As well as being a model, Vittucci is often described as the "manager" of Gaetano Savini, one of Brioni's two co-founders.
Anyway, here they both are eight years later, in a report in the Sydney Morning Herald from September 6, 1960, noting their arrival in Australia for what may have been the country's first menswear week. Asked what he thought of how the local men dressed – assuming the stained shorts, stained vest and manky flip-flops look was as popular then as it is now – Savini noted "a general lack of clothes consciousness", but put it all down to "shyness". Australian men, he added "need to wear gayer, more colourful clothes". The report doesn't say whether Savini and Vittucci expected to leave the country alive after that withering precis of Aussie style. But whether they did or not, I think Vittucci's contribution to the art of catwalk modelling deserves to be recognised and celebrated. More so than Taylor Fuchs's, anyway.
barry.didcock@heraldandtimes.co.uk
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