![]() ![]() There’s no official industry-governing body that determines when a mere model morphs into a super, but there are a few prerequisites. Not long after, he stomps down the runway at the Owens show, facial hair intact. When he smiles for the photo, the concrete lair feels several watts brighter. The other models, who look like slightly emaciated Ken dolls that have spent all day being poked, prodded, and dressed up, do not. Now, he’s got action-figure-level sculpted abs and pecs. Mason used to look very young and skinny, “a brown boy next door,” as Bethann Hardison, the pioneering model and advocate who led the charge for diversity on the runways starting in the 1970s, puts it to me. They are beautiful, but the contrast between them is real. As we chat in Paris, a couple of young models, his peers for the afternoon in the Owens show, ask him for a selfie. Today, Mason is entering a new tier of celebrity, a Met Gala regular with over a million Instagram followers who lays his head in five-star hotel suites the world over. Shirt by Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood. Others squish malevolent black lenses onto the models’ corneas. In the room, some makeup artists paint thick black V’s on the boys’ faces. The models serve as canvases that are modified by the several dozen hairstylists and makeup artists to perfectly fulfill Owens’s singular vision for the season. ![]() That’s the vibe on the Rick Owens runway. I had noticed, standing among the room of towering, wraithlike figures who would soon be joining Mason on the runway, that not one other model had so much as a single whisker on their mug. “Rick comes to me about an hour ago,” Mason tells me, “and says, ‘It’s totally up to you, but do you want to shave your beard?’ ” We’re in the concrete basement of the Palais de Tokyo, about a half hour before Mason will walk in the Rick Owens fall-winter 2023 runway show, and Mason is wrestling with a decision, stroking the goatee that dusts his cantilevered jawline. Wearing a long black coat and colossal platform boots, ropes of thick, braided hair framing his fiercely angular face, he looks like a Marvel hero flirting with the dark side. In a subterranean bunker beneath Paris, Alton Mason materializes to a soundtrack of ear-splitting German techno.
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