Shaun DeWet; GQ Jan 04

Soon you'll be seeing male model Shaun De Wet everywhere - in magazines, on billboards, on television and on runways. He'll travel the world, become rich and land any woman he wants, all before his twenty-second birthday. Nice work, if you can get it by: Michael Paterniti.
He walks through strobe and electric air, wearing silk suits and 1950s tennis outfits, chain-mail vests and, once, unbelievably, a cashmere diaper. His is not to question why. His is not to ponder too deeply the cashmere diaper, let alone the ugly, frozen planets at the edge of existence or the huddled, tattered-shoed masses. He sometimes walks wearing $1,000 loafers of the finest calfskin and then, the next moment, walks barefoot.

He's neither waif nor muscled lunker. He never works out, does very little except occasionally relinquish himself to the hands of a masseuse or manicurist to keep up appearances. But he walks a lot, through purple-lit alleys walled with people who want him - or, more precisely, who want what he wears. He walks the runways in Paris, Berlin, New York, Milan - wherever the money's best. In front of hundreds, sometimes thousands of admirers, he has walked to a soundtrack of women groaning in erotic ecstasy, and he has walked to street-thug boasts about the thrill of capping cops. He's the bullet and the G-spot.

No matter what the venue, the walk is virtually the same. It's nothing he learned deliberately and it's nothing he's had to practice. He bends slightly forward, head leading, mouth fastened, serious-looking to the point of menace, but a kind of empty menace, an unmenacing menace defined at its center by a blankness onto which others project their own ideas about sex, power, money and culture. He is merely a movie screen. A bauble. Pez. When he appears before the crowd, his blue eyes gaze straight ahead, receiving and reflecting nothing. His face is its own landscape, one of planed surfaces that change with the light, the mood, the dress. He has small ears, full lips, a strong, straight nose. He has high cheekbones and a forehead that has a kind of Cro-Magnon power. And yet he seems delicate somehow. He's better looking than Keanu Reeves, the person people have said he vaguely resembles. He thinks he looks like his dad.

Mostly, people don't care what he thinks - or even what his name is. Despite being one of the world's top models, despite having had contracts with Hugo Boss and Calvin Klein, he's only a face, a shell. Even as he looms on posters in store windows or appears in magazine spreads, even as he walks the runways of the world, few people pause to wonder whether he believes in God or wants kids someday or even if he had a heroin problem years ago. He decorates our culture, is being used up by it, and he knows this. He was born beautiful, be he wasn't born dumb. If people condescend, that's their problem. He's 21 years old and owns a car and a house in South Africa, rents a swank apartment on Gramercy Park in New York with his model girlfriend and travels the world, partying with other beautiful people and drinking Cristal. Nice work, if you can get it. By the way, his name is Shaun De Wet. You've already met him thirty, forty, fifty times without knowing it. He was the wordless one, lurking there in your closet. He was the one who wore your coat, your suit, your checked shirt, your striped socks, even your cashmere diaper.

And that's why you bought it.

*****

"This place is crisp," says Shaun, lounging in the lobby bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Milan. He arrived from Paris last night for the most important biannual event in men's fashion, the five-day run of shows known as Fashion Week. Fashion Week is the official rollout of the spring line for many of the world's most famous fashion houses, including Gucci, Armani, Prada, Versace and Calvin Klein, as well as smaller houses like Neil Barrett, John Varvatos and Romeo Gigli - each fighting for it's slice of a $52 billion industry. During this time - and another five days in winter - the fashion world freezes in one place to admire, pillory, gossip, condemn, imbibe, inhale and celebrate the newest sartorial confections. Shaun first came to Milan in January 2000, which makes this his eighth season walking the runway. In both dog and fashion years, he's a middle-aged man, even though, sitting here between casting calls and a fitting, he has the lithe, man-boy appearance that is de rigueur at the moment. He is six feet one, 160 pounds with a thirty- one-inch waist, and he seems mostly devoid of body hair except for the coppery mane on his head. He wears several gold rings and slouches a bit as he slurps San Pellegrino and takes a few bites from a chicken club sandwich. Though he's staying at another hotel - one favored by models that is decidedly more hip and reasonably priced - he admits he could get comfy here, glancing around the lobby, a spectacle of industry power brokers and stars like Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones who are in town for the shows and the Versace party. "These are good fucking potato chips," he says.

Though the shows begin tomorrow, Shaun has received only a few confirmations. This is not unusual, even for the top male models. And so the week begins with a rush of casting calls and pent-up anxiety. Once a model is picked - usually between fifteen and thirty are chosen per show - there's a fitting the day before and then a call time, two to three hours before the show itself, during which the models are prepped and dressed. Because of his elite status, Shaun doesn't have to suffer the indignity of waiting with 100 other models for hours on a baking sidewalk, but even in prearranged auditions, he's subjected to the same scrutiny of those who choose - often a designer and his or her lieutenants. Each meeting becomes a kind of quorum, contest and validation of something that Shaun doesn't entirely control: his "look." In his case, that look is ever pliable and easily manipulated, and it's exactly what designers have counted on to sell millions of dollars of clothes.

"I'm happy to be what other people want me to be, as long as I'm being paid for it," Shaun says. "I'll do pretty much anything for the right pay - wear fur, pose nude. I haven't posed nude yet, but if it was tastefully done, I would."

Because everything unfolds so quickly here, Shaun is a slave to his cell phone, jumping to attention each time it rings. "This is Shaun," he says, answering. It's his agent Natalie, telling him he's on for the Laura Biagiotti show.

"Wicked," says Shaun. "Peaches and cream. Got it... Okay. Ciao."

Shaun has a smoky voice with the slightest Afrikaner inflection, nearly passing for British. Every once in a while, he runs into a word that seems to cause a synaptic misfire, a half-second stammer. In that most fleeting of moments, he appears not so much a model-god at the center of some charmed, white-hot hipness, but a sweet nervous kid who hopes people will continue to like him.

For Shaun, despite the frisson of the Four Seasons lobby and the glamour he adds to it, Milan is yet another moment of reckoning for him. With the clock ticking, he's not yet been picked for Gucci, Prada or Calvin Klein, all important "gets," both for the money and for the prestige, and because they may then lead to an exclusive contract. Contracts are what separates the made from the unmade models. With his contract for Hugo Boss, Shaun earned roughly $200,000 for five days of actual work.

"We're waiting to hear on a lot of stuff," says Shaun, his legs bouncing nervously beneath the table. And what if everyone says no? Is this the beginning of the end? And how weird would it be to have this celebrity life and then, suddenly, be washed-up at the age of 21?

*****

Truths about male models:

1. In a business where the designers and stylists are predominantly gay - and where many assume that male models are, too - the majority of male models seem not to be gay at all. "I know everyone," says Shaun, "and only two models that I know of are gay."

2. Summing up male-model attitudes towards their female counterparts, one male model named Damien says, "Most girl models are social-climbing bitches who won't talk to you unless you're loaded. You see 18-year-old girls with 50-year-old wankers all the time." Gisele ranks high on the list of those they dislike. Another model says, "She travels around with this little fucking white terrier named Vida, and sits there either talking about herself or her dog. One time, I did a job with her, and we were there for hours sweating it out in suits, waiting for her to show up. When the limo pulled up, she got out with Vida and said, 'What are you standing around for?' and another guy turned to one of the stylists and said very loudly, so Gisele could hear, 'Will someone tell Gisele to shut the fuck up?'"

3. On the other hand, most male models love Christy Turlington.

*****

On the second afternoon of fashion week, Shaun is trying on outfits at a fitting for the designer Romeo Gigli, a smaller fashion house run by Romeo Gigli himself. The confirmations have begun to roll in, and Shaun is here with another male model named Jeremy Hassol, a guy who, like Shaun, has had past good luck in Milan, especially with Gucci, the biggest payday of the week. If picked again, Jeremy stands to make $15,000 for one walk down the runway. "Gucci is basically what I'm here for," says Jeremy.

Though seeming opposites, Shaun and Jeremy are best friends. They have both lived at the highest echelons of the male-model world for four years now, which means they gross somewhere up to half a million dollars a year - before doling out 20 percent to their agents and then covering expenses. When not specifically travelling on contract work - and for nearly every model, runway work isn't contract work - models pay their own way, or take a loan from their agency on a gamble that this season's runway work will prove lucrative. So Shaun and Jeremy split a room. Besides that, there are the bar tabs and room service and their ever cheerful driver named Stefano. After Milan, there's the trip to Paris for more shows, the hotel in Paris, the clubs in Paris - and finally, the flight home to New York.

Whereas Shaun projects a kind of assumed, if not actual, fair-haired refinement, Jeremy is all id and swagger, with a scar on his neck and a king's crown tattooed on his shoulder. He's leaner and taller than Shaun, with dark hair, thick brows, startling hazel eyes and a mouth that doesn't stop moving. Sometimes, when he passes Shaun in the strobes of the runway, he'll mutter something under his breath just to see if he can goad Shaun into laughter. Shaun and Jeremy dress in a downstairs room before wall-length mirrors, attended by three young women who pick clothes from a rack and dress the models. Romeo Gigli's clothes are carnivalesque: jarring combinations of stripes and bright colors. Trying on a pair of oversize shoes, Jeremy says, "I feel like a fucking clown." As one of the women kneels before Shaun to pick up a pair of shoes from which he's just stepped, he simultaneously strips to his white Skivvies. In another context, it might be the prelude to sex, but both the woman and Shaun wear impassive expressions. "I got used to the naked stuff a long time ago," says Shaun. "It's hard to be a model if you don't."

When the outfits seem right, Shaun and Jeremy are sent down a hallway and up a flight of stairs to where Gigli sits wearing white beach floods and a sheer pink tank top. He smiles at the models but then turns deadly serious as he evaluates their various ensembles. Standing before Shaun, Gigli pouts in consideration, adjusts a lapel, twists a tie liminally to the right, then sends Shaun up and back, and then Jeremy, in wild-striped suits. When he is pleased, he has them photographed with a Polaroid, and then the photos are pinned beside pictures of other models in their outfits on a bulletin board that will serve as a blueprint for the show. The two models head back for another outfit. On the way, Jeremy notices a young blond woman in a white shift who sits with her tan legs crossed at a downstairs table for visitors. She is the very pretty girlfriend of a male model who has just arrived, and Jeremy can't keep his eyes off her.

"Man, do you see her checking us out?" Jeremy says to Shaun. "She doesn't mind looking, does she?" He keeps leaning, looking through the door at the woman.

"She's a little too big to be a model," says Shaun, meaning she's not stick thin.

"But she's hot," says Jeremy. And then, as if to explain why he's looking back, he says with a touch of both utter bewilderment and longing, "Dude, I haven't gotten laid in a month."

Later, out on the street, Shaun and Jeremy linger in the orange glow of a slow-setting sun, waiting for Stefano to come around. A light wind, the temperature of hot tea, luffs the leaves of a nearby almond tree. Shaun's cell phone rings: Natalie again. He listens intently, looking serious, then grins. "Wicked," he says into the phone. "I'll be there. Ciao."

After hanging up, he doesn't say what the call was about. He has two fittings and another casting call to get to, while Jeremy, whose phone isn't ringing and who's still waiting to hear on a number of shows, is heading back to the hotel. This must be model etiquette, or one friend protecting the other for a moment. But later the truth outs: Shaun got Gucci, and Jeremy didn't.

*****

More truths about male models:

1. They hate Milan as much as Milan hates them. In bars here, there are signs that read NO MALE MODELS. If female models are desirable, appetizing nightclub garnish, male models are dangerous because they attract other men's girlfriends and because they're not quick to back down from a fight. One year a model showed up with a broken nose after a bar-room brawl, and an influential stylist, seeing his purpled eyes and bent proboscis, said, "It's perfect. Don't change a thing."

2. Models like Shaun will pocket about $15,000 for five days in Milan, but laws prohibit traveling with excessive amounts of currency. Thus, models have multiple foreign bank accounts and somtimes buy gold jewelry to transport their earnings home.

3. The grail for most runway models is the Gucci show, because the money's great and, backstage, there's a cornucopia of M&M's and candy bars, Big Macs and free smokes. Finally, there's the unusually vivid pep talk, delivered each year by one of the show's organizers: "You're the fifteen hottest guys in Milan," it begins, "and every woman out in that room wants to fuck you. I want to fuck you. You're all badasses, and when you walk out there every eye will be on you and they'll want to fuck you..." And so it goes. "He definitely makes you feel pretty special," says one model, "but he could just say, 'You're the man,' and leave it at that."

*****

Nine a.m. on Tuesday, the third day of Fashion week, and Shaun is backstage at the Missoni show, where quarters are cramped and windowless. There's been a building momentum to his week as he's been confirmed for show after show and, with Stefano at the wheel, he's crisscrossed Milan at all hours of the day and night to arrive on the next designer's doorstep.

Now he and a model from Kentucky named Boyd, who has spent the past year as the face of Christian Dior, sit before mirrors that run the length of the wall, worried over by stylists who juggle makeup brushes, curlers, blow-dryers and cans of L'Oreal Elnett. One dabs foundation under Shaun's eyes; another mousses Boyd's hair. Both models slouch in their chairs, in T-shirts and low-slung jeans, staring blankly ahead, smoking, accepting as a matter of course all this fuss.

In the bounce of opposite mirrors, their images reflect to infinity, yawning. Thirty male models are scheduled for the show today, wearing thirty outfits in all. As yet, though, only twenty-nine have shown up. It's Jeremy who's MIA. "Where is he?" Shaun says out loud to no one in particular. Last night, Shaun returned after midnight to the hotel to find Jeremy loaded and dervishing on champagne in the lobby bar. "There was no stopping him," Shaun says, adding that he's left Jeremy sometime after 2 a.m. lying faceup on the bar, swigging vodka straight from a bottle. "He never made it back to the room." Nearby, a collection of already styled models play Hacky Sack. Another model, a solidly built, long-haired American named Chris (as in Chris Grossarth; this Missoni show was Spring/Summer 2004), goes from one model to another, looking grave and telling each he has a very important question. He pauses solemnly before asking.

"Would you rather have breasts or a vagina?" he says.
"You mean, if I were a woman?" says a bare-chested model tapped to wear a tight bathing suit for the show.
"No," says Chris, "you're a man, and you're either going to be given breasts or a vagina. Which one?"
"Neither. Besides, I don't have room for a vagina."
"No. That's not the point. You have to choose."
"Jesus," says the model. "I have to choose?"
"That's what I said," says Chris. "There's no easy out."

Meanwhile, the stylists have released Shaun. Whereas at the Valentino show the theme was, according to one stylist, "big, luxurious hair" - and Shaun sported a hair salad right out of Munchkinland - the Missoni look this season is blessedly neat and natural. Shaun lights another cigarette and drifts over to fill a cup of coffee. Then he pulls out his cell phone and stares at it a moment, as if hoping for divination. During the time they've been friends, he's never known Jeremy to miss a show. As much as there's money at stake for Jeremy, there's his reputation. And without that, he won't work again.

"Breasts or vagina?" Chris says, moving down a line of guys, each standing before his own rack of clothing, waiting to be dressed. "Breasts or vagina?"

Shaun dials a number, asks to speak with someone, and a moment later he's on the phone with Jeremy, who's in bed with a fortysomething female agent from Los Angeles, one who'd extended an open invitation for sex their first night in Milan. Shaun hangs his head so others can't overhear and implores Jeremy to come down to Missoni right away. He listens a minute, shakes his head and hangs up. "He said, 'Fuck it. Tell 'em my father died,'" says Shaun.

Approaching showtime, a woman calls out in English: "We're going to need cigarettes out soon. First costume in fifteen minutes." Chris then makes an announcement of his own - "Guys, I have eleven vaginas and no breasts!" - which is received with scattered golf applause. Shaun glances at his watch, pulls out his cell phone, and begins to dial, but there's no signal now.

"He's going to wake up in a few hours and realize he made a huge mistake," he says. "We're a dime a dozen around here, and they'll have someone in two seconds to replace him."

Moments later, the models are dressed and then lined up, fussed over again by a legion of stylists. Sure enough, Jeremy's place has been filled by a guy who looks like Jeremy. Outside, in the theater, the crowd quiets and the music begins - the usual loud-thumping, sexed- up soundtrack of this dreamworld. And the man-boys, no longer joking and smiling but turned rather stern and in character, begin their march down the runway. Shaun is somewhere in the middle of the line but no longer looks like himself, among all the others who no longer look like themselves. They are nameless faces, shells, bound in the world's finest threads.

When Shaun walks out, there's a white flash of camera lights - and the collective, electric gaze of a packed house assembled to worship or ridicule. He's the bullet and the G-spot. On him, the clothes liquefy and shimmer. And for those who doubt it, imagine this world without Shaun: You couldn't pay people enough money to come to Milan at the swampy end of June to see these clothes rolled out on a hanger. It just would never, ever work.

*****

Final truths about male models:

1. Women speak to them in threes.

2. Men pretend to ignore them while often studying them more closely than women do.

3. The cost of beauty - the poking, the prodding, the pin sticking, having to wear G-strings or heavy wool sweaters in the sweltering sauna of Milan in June - is balanced by the fine sum that beauty gets paid. "It's a pretty easy job," says one model. "We walk up and back. We sit around and get photographed with beautiful women. And then there's the afterparty."

4. Male models excel at the afterparty.

*****

On the last full day in Milan, just before everyone jumps on flights to Paris for three more days of shows, a famous fashion house throws a private bash for a few hundred of its closest friends. This is something Shaun has been looking forward to all week - the chance to chill and party. And there's plenty to celebrate: In the end, he bagged the biggies - Gucci, Prada and Calvin Klein - and had fun with the littler houses like Verri and Nicole Farhi.

In all, he did twelve shows. And throughout the fourteen-hour days, he was polite and earnest, punctual and perfectly moldable. He got mad only once, when a woman, one of the organizers who gypsies from production to production, asked for his name when he arrived at another show. "Shaun," he'd said. And then, under his breath: "You should know that by now."

The only black mark was Jeremy, who after missing Missoni never showed up for Romeo Gigli. While Shaun was having his hair shampooed, moussed and dried for the second time that day, his cell phone rang. It was Jeremy.

"I'm gone, bro. I'm quitting," he said. "Yeah, I'm on my way to the airport right now." And just like that, he was on a plane back to New York.

"Maybe if he'd come around and apologized or kissed some ass...," says Shaun, "but it's his choice. He says he wants to go back to college at Columbia. He gets, like, straight A's there."

The bash is thrown in a huge open room, and the DJ spins a mix of techno, Ibiza dance and old-school disco. The crowd is a sweaty mash of everyone from young male and female models in torn jeans to older fashionistas who, three decades ago, might have worn fuschia Nehru- collared shirts irony-free to an event like this. At either end of the room are bars manned by shirtless male models wearing short shorts. Several press through the tight crowd, as if scripted to do so, retrieving bottles of champagne, dancing closely with the most enthusiastic taker. And there are many enthusiastic takers.

On the dance floor, Jake Boyle, a New York model, wearing a T-shirt that is safety-pinned and scrawled with punk band names in ink, is talking to two sisters, twins who both model, swaying with a drink in each hand. Boyd stands near one corner, talking to several women. It turns out that Dior has picked another model for their new campaign. "They told me to lose weight," Boyd says. "But I'm blowing over as it is. I mean, I'm becoming a man. I can't be a boy forever."

Meanwhile, Shaun moves through the crowd, downing glasses of champagne, greeting his righteous male-model posse with big hand slaps and soulful chest bumps while gently double-bussing those women he knows.

When the music goes tribal, Shaun makes his way up to the DJ booth and positions himself above the crowd, pointing to his friends and rocking to the music. With him is a nonmodel brunet, who's spent the evening moving closer and closer. Then all at once, with some surge in the music, she pushes up against his body and kisses him. Perhaps it's that Shaun is very serious about his new girlfriend - "I just moved in with her, man, and I'm not going to blow it" - but he politely accepts her kiss, only as if he were taking her coat, then does nothing to encourage her. Instead, he goes right back to rocking with the crowd.

Out on the street afterward, at what is now about 4 a.m., a group of male models loiter. A former Guess? Jeans model, a Brazilian with anything but little-boy pecs, guzzles from a vodka bottle while sitting on a motorbike. Shaun begins looking for a taxi while Jake, the punker from New York, decides he's going to run back to his hotel. Just takes off running, his long gazelle legs driving him sideways for about four or five steps until he leans like Pisa, then smacks down on the pavement. Again and again - each time with a sickening thud. As he makes his jagged way down the street, several people in taxis pull up to ask if he needs a ride, only to be met with a string of obscenities and another face-plant. When he reaches a second traffic light down the street, he simply disappears.

Fashion is meant to be fantasy, the magic thread sewn into the lattice of our occasionally humdrum lives, an expression of our own creativity and fetishes and aspirations. But the difference between us and Shaun is that, on the runway, he wears the clothes he does for few of these reasons. He wears them primarily for survival and profit. He's a mercenary who dreams of one day being the first male supermodel identifiable, finally, by the thing that eludes most people now: his name.

Tomorrow the shows move to Paris, Berlin, New York. Another season will arrive, and with it a new parade of faces and bodies and perhaps even a new Shaun De Wet. You may notice these faces, you may not. But on the empty streets of Milan at 4 a.m., the real Shaun De Wet waves down a cab and heads back to his hotel room, which is now minus a roommate. For the moment, he has survived another season in Milan. His call for tomorrow morning's show is 8 a.m., and he plans to be there on time.