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characteristic handling of ethnicity. Petri generally avoided models with blond, clean-cut good looks (of the sort preferred by American fashion photographer Bruce Weber), unless they could be used to suggest eroticised innocence or touch-me-not sensuality.13" His bias was for young men who were Latinate, Afro-Caribbean, chicano, or of mixed-race origins. Such preferences were not merely a pandering to ethnic fashionability. They meshed with Petri's visual philosophy of social and sexual plurality. A Caribbean theme was caught in one of the caption titles of the Arena sequence: ' Yard Style Easy Skanking' (my emphasis). In West Indian dialect the term 'yard' was suggestive of home, or home territory, but it also carried connotations of a 'yardie', the member of a gang.IJJ The fashion plates which followed the 'ragamuffin' photographs were slyly entitled: 'the boys in the band' (plates 14-18) . With their homosexual punning on the American dramatist Mark Crawley's 196os play of the same name, the images profiled trumpeters and drummers, bouncers, guitarists and vocalists in situ in a nightclub setting.IJ4 Shot on location at Delirium, in the

Astoria nightclub in London's Charing Cross Road, the photographs featured black models Craig, Miles and Tony in varying moods of cool. Craig (plate 15) was the archetypal dude, introspective but self-possessed. Clad in a white linen suit, he was pictured drawing on a cigarette while relaxing at a jazz musicians' break. Miles (plate 16) was black and proud - his fine-boned features and braided hair were caught in semi-profile. But his composure was undercut by the gigantic lizard diamante pinned to his tuxedo, with its suggestions of camp or overblown brilliance. Tony (plate 18), the lead singer who was featured as 'king creole', was shyer. Hooded like a rapper, and clad in an oversize jacket, he bowed his head as he clutched the microphone close to his body. The light played across his softer features to produce a sense of insecurity. In a different cultural mould there was Marco (plate 17) , simultaneously acting out both the part of the nightclub bouncer and the uninvited guest, in 'members only'. With olive skin, deep dark-set eyes and full mouth, his looks were classically Latinate. Marco's body posture and his face were deliberately set at variance. His physical demeanour was threatening, suggesting the confrontational stance of the bouncer. Yet his face was soft and questioning, even passive. In sequences such as these Petri was not averse to playing with ethnic stereotypes and their accompanying.frisson of racial difference. Black skin tones were often highlighted and poses exaggerated. But his ironic combination of props and narrative format avoided the fetishisation of racial otherness, which was a feature of the other contemporary documenter of black masculinity, American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.135 Petri's images refused the tight fixing of race, partly because his photo-shoots juxtaposed a plurality of ethnic looks in adjacent frames. The images moved rapidly from one type of masculinity to another. The effect was

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Plates 14-18 'the boys in the band', fashion sequence, styling Ray Petri, photog.aphy Marc Lebon, Arena, March-April 1987

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to promote the idea of cultural diversity a s part of a diaspora of style.

Petri and his collaborators ran sequence after sequence of these visual experiments in both The Face and Arena. 'Float Like a Butterfly Sting Like a Bee . . . Check Out The Beef!', which appeared in The Face in June 1985, once again with photography by Morgan, rehearsed mock dramas on the theme of prize­ fighting, picturing models in lycra, fur and silk. 'The cowboy, the indian and other stories', from the October issue of the same year, spliced images of black and Latinate gunslingers with more about ragamuffins and boxers, while 'Buffalo a more Serious Pose', appearing a year later, featured tales of quirky spivs and wide-boys, along with black American prayermen. 136 All these visuals ran according to a similar format. There was the continuing use of Petri's favourite models, who were usually shot solo. Also repeated was the bricolage theme; the scrambling together of aggressive emblems of masculinity with more ambiguous signifiers. The net effect was both seductive and challenging. Readers were invited to enter this world of visual spectacle without the reassurance of a coherent grammar of meaning.

Read purely in formal terms, as texts in a frame, fashion images such as these can tell the historian little. But decoded socially, they can point to the referents which stylists and photographers drew on to shape their vision of the world. Petri's images were part of an identifiable cultural ensemble, which he mobilised repeatedly during the 198os for his account of masculinity. Some indication ofhis favoured materials was suggested by the fashion plates themselves. Many of the artefacts and visual scenarios which he utilised originated in the world of urban style. There was the characteristic scrambling of haute couture design with street fashion. Belts in the ragamuffin spreads came from Japanese designer Issey Miyake, leather and fur caps from Hatrack in London's Porto bello Road. But other items were picked up from chain-store retailers, or from second-hand and market traders. The majority of Petri's images, like the overall stance of the style magazines, were unapologetically metropolitan. They drew their impetus from the ambience of city life, from the looks and glances of the street and the urban spectacle.

This was the general context for Petri's visual experiments. Commentators on his work have pointed to more specific influences, notably the continuing impact of punk in shaping the montage effects, together with a retrospective reading of 1950s youth culture.'37 When Petri himself was asked by The Face in 1985 where he found his buffalo his nonchalant reply was, 'Oh, just around'.'38 Such a non-committal answer was not entirely accurate. The most significant influence on Petri's creative output was contemporary forms of gay male culture. Petri himself was homosexual. His sexual orientation was not significant in itself, in any simple authorial sense, for his work cannot be

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understood as the unproblematic product of a 'gay sensibility'.139 Rather, Petri's knowledge of homosexual life equipped him with a set of competences with which to visualise masculinity. More generally, his styling for The Face pointed to the ways in which the cultures of sexual dissidence left their mark on more normalising images of men during the period. As we shall see, consumer culture involved an elaborate series of negotiations between homosocial and heterosocial accounts of the male self.

In the mid-198os variations of Petri's buffalo look were circulating in specific zones of London which provided the space for younger gay men to experiment with style culture. Soho and its environs, in London's West End, was a particular site for these displays of fashionability. Permutations of the same look were also visible in the new homosexual quarters of Paris, notably in the Marais and Les Halles districts of the fourth arrondissement, and in the increasingly chic streets to the north of the Bastille, in the eleventh. Shops, cafes, bars and nightclubs provided the commercial infrastructure in these urban spaces. We shall have much more to say about the social geography of such areas later. Suffice it to note here that the visual styles assembled by younger gay men resonated heavily in Petri's fashion spreads. The dress code of the urbanites revolved around a razored 'flat-top' haircut, or 195os quiff, worn with a black American Air Force bomber jacket, red neck-bandanna, Levi's jeans, white socks and Doctor Martens shoes or boots.r4o The look mutated several times during the latter part of the decade. Yet the precise artefacts and accessories were less important than the general coding of gay identity. This contemporary representation was relatively fluid in its treatment of homosexuality. It drew on a range of signifiers which were not specific to gay culture, but which featured as part of the consciousness of a generation of young people who had been educated into consumer style. The overall image was one of fashionable sexual ambiguity.

The influence of homosexual culture was present in various aspects of Petri's output. But it was most evident in the visual language which anchored so many of his sequences. We have noted how these photo-shoots frequently crescendoed in an exchange of looks between the model and his audience, which was redolent with the excitement of sexual sameness. This contact was fixed on a dialogue of the eyes, which produced the effect of sharing a secret knowledge. Petri's paradigm for this form of reciprocal spectatorship drew on one of the most important structures of recognition between homosexual men: the visual contact involved in 'cruising' for casual sex. 'Homosexuals recognize each other - the way Jews do. The mask dissolves, and I would venture to discover my kind betweeen the lines of the most innocent look.' French poet and dramatist Jean Cocteau was commenting in 1930 on a form of visual communication which has featured prominently in the reproduction of modem homosexual culture since its

inception in the late nineteenth century.141 An exchange of looks, working to confirm a shared identity, as a possible prelude to sexual contact, has been a hallmark of this homosexual gaze. A specific version of the look was recurrent in gay pornography in the 1980s, in magazines such as Him or Mister, where the interplay between model and audience was suffused with desire. However, in Petri's output these visual codes were more subtly nuanced. His images did not work to delineate homosexuality as such; their remit was more diffuse. They suggested the intimacy of a bond betweeen men - a homosocial rather than an exclusively homosexual gaze. Fixed sexual signifiers were refused in favour of the repeated differal of meaning around masculinity. Petri's sequences were 'camp' in the sense defined by photographic theorist Susan Sontag. They worked with a flamboyant iconography, which was susceptible to double interpretations, with one idea offered to a knowledgeable audience and another, more impersonal frame of reference, given to outsiders. 142 Petri was not the only contemporary image-maker to deploy this type of rhetoric. A similar version of homosexual innuendo informed many of Gaultier's fashion collections during the 198os, with their raiding of the sartorial fetishes of the homosexual wardrobe. Gaultier always acknowledged his debt to the inventiveness of stylists like Petri. He believed that such individual talents could be found more easily in London's creative urban environment than in Paris. As Gaultier explained to Arena in 1987: 'London stimulates me. It gives me energy. It's something about the ambience."43

Ray Petri's portfolio was influential at two different levels. Like Brody's designs, his work confirmed the reputations of The Face and Arena as being in the vanguard of creative fashion styling. The buffalo theme was ideal material for these magazines. The flexibility of its scripts guaranteed it a prime visual place in the pages of the style press. When Brody announced in 1988 that art direction had replaced graphic design as the organising principle of Arena, he implicitly paid tribute to Petri's influence.144 But Petri's images also reached out beyond the fashion leaders. The importance of Petri for our argument lies in the way in which his account of masculinity was drawn on by mainstream advertisers and retailers working on young men's consumer markets. Petri was not the sole author of these visual philosophies. His representations co-ordinated a set of themes which had their origins within broader fields of urban culture. In that sense Petri and his team operated as creative facilitators, whose talent lay in translating the looks and poses of the street into an identifiable language of style.

Yet though Petri's visual statements were applauded by the leaders of style culture, they did not go unchallenged by more mainstream players in the fashion world. In the mid-198os such representations - and the culture on which they drew - provoked a moral tirade from the gatekeepers of the men's clothing industry about the damaging effects of 'street style'. The leading trade journal,

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Men's Wear, railed continuously both against the excesses of what it termed the 'youth cult', with its preference for throwaway clothing, and against the downmarket 'yobbo influences' which had 'our culture in its grip nowadays'.'45 These diatribes condensed deep-seated economic anxieties about the state of the

British clothing market. Badly hit by the recession of the late 1970s and early 1 98os, manufacturers were worried that recovery was being sabotaged by the taste patterns of an esoteric elite. Men's Wear went on to complain that top designers were turning their backs on classic styling, such as suits and smart casual clothes, which were held to be the key to the regeneration of the industry. Instead they favoured an instant fashion ethos, with a preference for the outrageous and the bizarre. '46 Such complaints from the mainstream section of the trade against the antics of its avant-garde were not new. But in the climate of the mid-198os they took on a moral as well as an economic critique. Men's Wear editorials not only echoed the entrepreneurial values of the Conservative government, they also adopted an evangelical tone in relation to the gender ambiguities which they believed were damaging men's fashion. Taking the offensive, the journal began to point the finger at the 'high-camp' images ofhomosexuals, who, it claimed, had infiltrated the fashion scene.'47 In 1986 this sense of outrage at the catwalk displays in the London menswear shows stung some writers into going still further. Journalist John Taylor led the attack. A number of the new British fashion talents to emerge at this time were homosexual men. Jasper Conran, John Flett and Galliano were the most prominent among them. Without directly naming individuals, Men's Wear hinted darkly that the upper floors of London tenements were spawning a generation of 'sad, sick transvestites' who paraded as 'new wave' designers. Professional androgyny was now applauded. Fashion had begun to stink!'48

Invective of this kind was the direct result of what the clothing trade perceived to be deliberate provocation. The moral critique of journalists like Taylor challenged the upsurge of an explicit discourse of sexual politics in the men's fashion industry. At the style press Petri was responsible for some of the most dramatic representations of men within this genre. With their deliberate strategy of disruption, his images worked to destabilise masculinity by invoking the power of homosocial relations. However, Petri's project marked a limit position. In the magazine culture of the period it was qualified by more cautious approaches. There were other languages which continued the scrutiny of men's lives, but which did so less via the dynamics of transgression than by turning their journalistic gaze on more conventional patterns oflife.

It was the appearance of a series of fledgling men's titles between rg86 and rg88 which consolidated the experiments in masculinity first made visible by the style press. While most of these publications were heavily influenced by the success of The Face and its competitors, their more explicit mode of address to men intensified the publishing debate about gender and consumption. Here we return to the issue which first surfaced in the discussions which followed from the failure of The Hit; the possibility of speaking to men as a community, or interest group, collectively shaped by retailing. Despite their differences, this was the theme which circulated endlessly among the editors and journalists who strove to break into the embryonic sector. As so often in the early stage of a product launch, these professionals were driven mainly by the adrenalin of excitement. They possessed little detailed information about their audience. Informed guesswork, coupled with boundless enthusiasm, were the most significant factors in the exploration of men's consumer patterns at this time. Each of the new entries into the publishing arena projected subtly different accounts of their readership. This was partly influenced by practical considerations, especially the need for product differentiation in a tight market. But it was also informed by competing accounts of the role played by commercial culture in the organisation of men's lives. More often than not these differences were argued out as disagreements over taste and editorial policy. But it was taste understood as a significant marker of social discrimination.

Among the most prominent of the new titles was Logan's own venture. Launched as Britain's first magazine for men, Arena appeared in November rg86. Rising circulation figures for The Face confirmed Logan's view that there was a potential audience for a men's general-interest title. His decision to embark on the new publication was also influenced by a desire to keep together his tightly knit editorial team, who he believed needed fresh challenges. Glossy and perfect bound, Arena was pitched at an older market than that of its more established companion. Billed by the advertising industry as the key to reaching 'the stylish, well-heeled' consumer, the magazine was aimed at the 24 to 35-year-old reader.'49 It was initially bi-monthly, with a projected circulation of between 45,000 and so,ooo. Awarded Media Week 's accolade of 'launch of the year', Arena found immediate favour with publishing professionals. Brody believed that its quality finish exuded an air of confidence and authority.'5°Logan and Sopp carried over from The Face the concept of taste leadership, which remained the organising principle behind their new venture. They were emphatic that Arena was not a

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'mainstream magazine'. This aloof prof:tle was confirmed when Sopp declined to enter the new title for the National Readership Survey, which worked with conventional definitions of social class in its analysis of magazine audiences. Sopp claimed that such traditional categories needed to be transcended, especially with a title which targeted not groups but individuals who were at the cutting edge of new social trends.rsrA superior model of consumption also shaped the choice of

products which were featured between Arena 's covers. Articles on fashion and a plethora of objets de luxe were the standard journalistic fare. Interior design, wine and gourmet food were other favourites. There were pieces on the latest exotic sports, such as windsurfing and scuba-diving, together with the accessories which were de rigueur for these leisure pursuits. Each month journalists grouped the various goods and services together in its 'Arena Recommends' section, which ran on the penultimate pages. The magazine functioned explicitly as a consumer manual, selecting those f:tlms, books and other items which were the current emblems of fashionability.