The Couture Dangle

In a way, it's not that surprising that Rick Owens was the designer to send men with exposed genitalia sauntering (bouncing? promenading? wagging?) down the runway in Paris this week. After all, his moody, drapey, muted-toned clothing has an almost penis-like quality to it. Leave it too long, and it drags. For some reason, I missed it -- or I didn't really get it -- when I first perused the shots on Style.com. After all, it only looked like a glimpse of low-hanging ball. Much ado about a peek of testes didn't get much of a response from me. Then Amelia pointed out "The Hottest New Trend in Menswear Is Visible Dick," and that got my attention. Gawker exposed full-on-dong, and I understood we were looking at something different here. But what, um, was it? "The penises weren't the point of the show," The Cut chided. Then what was? According to Owens, "Boys with their dicks out is such a simple, primal, childish gesture." Agreed, but what does it mean? In hopes of phallus analysis, I turned to the New York Times, where the always annoying Guy Trebay coughed up: "By deliberately exposing a few pendant bits of flesh, Mr. Owens seemed to be suggesting how tenuous and vulnerable are the basis for what we think of as masculinity." Ah-ha. So man is only as strong as the thread of skin that attaches his balls. Personally, I thought that between the overwhelmingly dull feminist sloganisms at Acne Studios and the horrendous guys-in-granny-getups at Gucci, Owens felt like someone must remind everyone: We Are Men, and These Are Our Penises. We got it, Rick. We got the dicks.

Image via Style.com