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Through a close reference to Steven Klein’s photo spread ‘John Robinson’ for L’Uomo Vogue in 2003, this article tracks the appearance of the fictional character of the queer villain in fashion editorial photography. It discusses specifically how the register of ‘affectlessness’ is embodied and aesthetically performed by the queer villain. Affectlessness is contextualized within the repertoire of neutral affects that were circulated in fashion photography in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an aesthetic stance that counteracted the normative depictions of ‘happy feelings’ in commercial imagery as well as normative styles of masculinity. Affective states of sadness, alienation and neutrality were enacted beginning in the 1990s primarily by androgynous and sexually ambivalent figures: the stylized representation of such states signalled a challenge to binary ways of embodying and performing masculinity and femininity. After a critical reading of ‘John Robinson’, the article concludes by tracing a speculative trajectory for thinking about aesthetic pleasure in relation to queer amoral characters in fashion visual narratives.

In this article, a photo story depicting "white trash" subjects in the act of defying middle-class proprieties of dress and manners serves as a case study for a critical exploration of the performative registers through which working-class bodies figure as agents of social sedition in the visual economy of fashion. The unglamorous and confrontational bodies in Memory-shot by Alexei Hay and Justine Parsons for Dutch in 2000-enact a parody of professional fashion models by exhibiting an exuberant, uncontained sexuality that cuts against the codes of "good taste" and decorum. The photo spread epitomizes how the vernacular aesthetic of "white trash" has been embraced by independent fashion magazines in order to unsettle the normative aesthetics associated with high fashion imagery and, more broadly, mainstream visual culture. Engaging with Giorgio Agamben's reflections on gesture and profanation, the article discusses the political effect of an overperformance of corporeality through prosaic, bawdy gestures and argues that the unboundedness of the bodies in the photo spread represents an affront to the capitalist regime of productivity from which these bodies are excluded. Finally, it highlights the contribution of the aesthetic category of "white trash" to the troubling of the representational conventions within the genre of editorial fashion photography and calls for a politically committed rethinking of the aesthetic consumption of fashion images.