Clothes by design, scars by accident

Hold the airbrush! Ordinary scars are chic, says 'The Face'. But only, it seems, on women of otherwise flawless beauty.

THE FACE - mission: to go where no fashion magazine has gone before - has done it again. After a corset-encased seven-year-old wandering through post-apocalypse ruins (June 1996); bleeding, naked, lesbian vampires (March 1997); and a masturbating teenage boy (April), this month's shock-horror fashion story, photographed by Sean Ellis, is called "Tissue: A Portfolio of Scars." In it, six "real people" (industry label for anyone who's not a model) show off the marks left by assorted accidents and operations. Patsy Kensit, explains the credits, wears underwear by Helmut Lang and "scar by appendix operation". Angel, a 21-year-old singer, is in a dress from Fabio Piras and "scar from scalding".

Why, exactly, are these shots so shocking? Is the new scar chic an escalation of the post-grungification of fashion, in which the new generation of supermodels all look like heroin addicts and directional fashion stories feature girls wearing cheap underwear in grotty bedsits? Or is scar chic a horrifying development within the body art movement, which started with pretty tattoos and dainty little naval studs and is now, post-Crash, all about cutting, burning, stretching and binding?

In fact - and moral majors will be disappointed about this - the Face photos cannot easily be linked to these two trends. As Sean Ellis notes, their look is glamorous, not grungey. "Bedsits are so over. I wanted to do something classically beautiful." As for post-bondage, Dave Deacon, a much-decorated professional body piercer, rejects the link between deliberate scarification and accidentally acquired scars. "It's not art," he declares of the latter. "It's something that happens to you."

The real reason that the "Tissue" story is shocking is that Western definitions of female beauty are so narrow and idealised. Airbrushing of even the hyper-real supermodels is routine for both advertising and editorial images; indeed, Sean Ellis airbrushed spots and bad skin out of his portraits. If a model/actress/whatever has a "flaw", it must be surgically altered, or - much more rarely - become her trademark, as in Cindy Crawford's mole, or the gap between Lauren Hutton's front teeth.

The pictures of men in the feature are less disturbing. But then for men, certain scars have always been an authentic badge of masculinity. According to Clare Gittings, curator of the forthcoming exhibition "The Pursuit of Beauty: Five Centuries of Body Adornment in Britain" (at the National Portrait Gallery from 30 May), the first Earl of Arlington (1618- 1688) was wounded across the nose during the Civil War. In an era when smallpox scars were routinely covered with make-up in life and ignored in art, his portrait proudly marks his fighting skills with a black patch. In the 19th century, upper-class German men would deliberately cut their faces to resemble duelling scars.

Contemporary pop culture has not been immune from scar machismo. Marlon Brando became the first modern sex symbol after he broke his nose halfway through the stage run of A Streetcar Named Desire, and he never got it fixed. Keanu Reeves has often been featured in teen posters bare-chested, showing off the massive scar he acquired falling off his massive motorbike. (For this reason, the two portraits of men in the Face portfolio are less arresting; tattooed and crop-haired, they are not scarred from operations but from unfortunate but traditional macho activity: car crashes and knives.)

For women, on the other hand, scars have always been a mark of shame. One of the biggest trade secrets in the fashion industry is that Linda Evangelista has a 21/2ft scar on her side, the result of a lung collapse in the early Nineties. Indeed, Sean Ellis and the casting agent Sue Pocklington spent six months trying to find willing subjects. "The problem with approaching people," says Ellis, "is that they nearly always said they felt uncomfortable with their scars." Eventually, they advertised on the London dance music radio station Kiss.

The irony is that scars are no less intrinsic to female than to male experience. As Ashley Heath, senior editor and fashion director at The Face, points out: "A lot of women are left with scars following childbirth. They're not shock-horror, they're everyday. But would British Vogue show a Caesarean scar?"

To be fair to Vogue, neither has The Face in this instance. These scarred women are more post-feminist riot girls than long-suffering for their gender, as in Jo Spence's photographs of her mastectomy scar. "What these photos are saying," declares Ted Polhemus, fashion anthropologist and author of The Customised Body (Fourth Estate), "is 'I've been around. I've had some hard knocks and it's real.' It's a statement of authenticity." Patsy Kensit agreed to participate precisely because photographers and stylists were always offering to airbrush her appendix scar, which, says Sean Ellis, she feels to be part of her history.

Sean Ellis agrees with Patsy. "When you see a perfect face, it's so unreal and plastic. That person hasn't lived. It's as if they have no history. A scar compels you to say, 'Wow, what happened?' It's worn every day as a reminder that they are a survivor."

If all this sounds like a great leap away from the tyranny of perfection perpetuated by magazines - "It's to be applauded," says Ted Polhemus, "given the amount of dissatisfaction in our culture with our bodies" - don't get too excited. These girls are all conveniently pretty, with no cellulite and no wrinkles. As the Kiss ad put it, The Face was looking for "cool, sexy people who happened to have a scar".

"In a way it's a fashion cliche," says Ashley Heath. "It's making the ugly beautiful." In other words, scars only work on model types. Even in The Facen