The Birmingham Post from Birmingham, West Midlands, England • 75

S' 4 3-jjwr WwMday April 5 1995 11 Lifestyle Short cut to sharp clothes Help is at hand for the larger man who wants to look trendy without clobbering his wallet Helle Falborg reports The su pennon of the time disport themselves in the mountains or at the side of swimming pools Posers in pouches and thick slices of beefcake If you are a man you like to be tall slim and fit? And you just love to wear a set of clothes that emphasise your strong body? Well that can be a big problem because even if you did achieve the body the clothes would be hard to find Birmingham basketball star Give Allen is 6ft 8in slim and fit and this is how he is greeted in a lot of clothes shops: when I go into a shop I even have to ask them if they have something in my size I can just see them shaking their he says used to be a problem When I was younger I hated shopping and I would squeeze myself into shoes and clothes that were too But now he loves to go shopping and sometimes buys his clothes in the sales when they bring out all the bits and pieces that nobody really wants But when I find something that actually fits I will buy it no matter how it he admits If like Give your feet are big arms and legs long and your wife needs to reach a lot wider than others when she gives you a hug then High Mighty on Smallbrook Queensway Birmingham can dress you from head to foot when ordinary shops have given up The store specialises in selling clothes for tall and big men Shop manager Brian Handley describes how his customers often feel about buying clothes people come in here thinking they are big But we are used to seeing big people every day so to us they are just normal customers try to make them feel at ease When they get the garments on and feel that they fit all their embarrassment and fear disappears have customers who buy a whole outfit and wear it out of the shop because they are so happy that they have found something that fits he explains Some of the larger sizes can be a little more expensive because of the extra work involved in their production but quality remains a priority Big men put more pressure on their clothes because they are heavier so they need better stitching and strong fabrics High Mighty are proud to be fussy think people pay a lot more for the clothes here We have shirts from £19 and in that quality they get it any cheaper anywhere else And our designer ranges are the same price as standard designer says Brian Handley Five years ago Give Alien went to college in America and when he changed his mind about shopping could find what I wanted and it would be at a regular price as well I went to one shoe shop and asked what their largest size was they said 18 and I said It was really nice to be able to try ten or 1 5 different types of shoes not saying that I want very different and colourful clothes and shoes but I would just like to have the same choice as everybody he says Some people say that big men should only wear dark clothes to make them seem smaller but that is not the case in High Mighty where bright and very colourful casual gear mixes with more formal dark suits is just a myth that big peqple should only wear dark clothes There anything they wear They look as good as anybody else if they feel comfortable in their clothes and if they fit regardless of says Brian Handley Clive Allen models for Pott Stylo on pages 12 and 13 Richard Edmonds reviews a book which gets down to the bare essentials of the male nude thoroughly explored in a book which seems to be the first of its kind Here are the supermen of the time seen disporting themselves in the mountains or at the side of swimming pools Wearing swimming trunks or posing pouches they are recorded exactly as they were at the time with every hair and every wrinkle (unsightly photographs are not ignored) establishing its own verisimilitude But the man who did more than anyone to promote the simple virtues of the naked male form was Bob Mizer founder of the Athletic Model Guild who set up the agency to spread the beefcake pic on the one hand and on the other to promote athletes among the community of Southern California And he succeeded although more with the photographs than with the models many of whom had the bodies but were unreliable drifters and in many cases ex-convicts Some of the models like Ed Fury (real name Edmund Holovchik) made it to Hollywood and had a movie career of sorts in the sword and sandal flicks of the and But Physique Pictorial was the magazine which contained men oiled and tensed in a way not seen before Men had never appeared near nude simply to be admired The code was that you had to take your clothes off for a reason Mizer said that to have a beautiful body was reason enough There were plenty of cheesecake mags around but beefcake still inspired hypocritical outrage It changed slowly and not before certain names became a byword for male unadorned beauty such as Glenn Bishop Steve Reeves and then Gordon Scott in the Tarzan movies Magazines still abound on the mag racks showing full-frontal males but as the author says regretfully: is no longer even one devoted solely to male Anyone who says beefcake is new is lying Adulation of the male form is as old as the pyramids The pharaohs were athletes appearing to their people coated in gold dust Physique photographers been invented and so they had themselves carved in effigy on the walls of their tombs just to leave a memory behind The Greeks and Romans went one better They created the ideal male form in marble naked and unashamed For ancient people the body was a temple and the male phallus was worshipped as the carrier bringing new life on earth It was an attitude which went on for a thousand years through the almost naked Christ on the cross to the bronze nudes of the European renaissance the self portraits in the buff of the great Durer or the nudes of Michelangelo or Leonardo where the naked male form was used either for itself as an aestheticly beautiful concept or to symbolise speed wealth power or nobility Late in the 19th century beauty was in the eye of the beholder and the beauty was male and belonged to Eugen Sandow the first of the beefcake boys Sandow sold the male body beautiful in a shrewd marketing strategy which made the muscle prince a wealthy man He was marketed as the by Florenz Ziegfeld better known for lavish girlie spectaculars booklets on posing and muscle control led to the first beauty which grew over succeeding decades into beefcake events with ever grander and more imposing titles ranging from Mr Olympia to Mr America then Mr Universe But in Beefcake by Valentine Hooven (Taschen £1199) which is published this month the whole field of the nude male physique photograph in the magazines of the 1950s not forgetting those of today 'is I Clive Allen is king on the basketball court but his height poses major problems.