147 MEN In 2017, Stella McCartney, who had launched her fashion house in 2001, expanded her brand of sustainable fashion and presented her debut menswear collection at the Abbey Road Studios in London. Cindy Sherman’s photographs of herself in McCartney’s gender-neutral outfits are as richly varied and colorful as the designs presented on the catwalk and the materials used. The ten large-format photographs form not only part of her Men series (2019–2020), they also mark the latest high point in her intense engagement with questions of identity, sex, and gender. Her multifaceted characters bear witness to the artist’s thorough interrogation of the various ways masculinity/masculinities and androgyny are typically represented. In the self-confident, to some extent hierarchically charged poses of the figures, seated alone or standing in pairs, Sherman plays with male stereotypes: casually posing with their hands in their pockets (Untitled #602), sitting wide-legged on a chair (Untitled #615), or resting a hand on the shoulder of the other figure, who appears marginally more feminine (Untitled #610). It is precisely in these putative juxtapositions of two figures reading as male and female that Sherman succeeds in dissolving the boundaries between normative gender classifications by approximating the appearance of her characters. They embody gender fluidity as well as diversity and new forms of expression, which can also manifest themselves through fashion statements. Sherman’s characters are arranged in front of the artist’s digitally manipulated travel photographs from Sicily (Untitled #603), Tokyo (Untitled #602), Bavaria (Untitled #612, Untitled #615, Untitled #618), Sissinghurst (Untitled #609, Untitled #610), and Lisbon/ Amagansett (Untitled #611). The near-metaphorical special effects and reflections incorporated into the backgrounds reference the mutability of identity/identities and shed further light on this current discourse.
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