Among the more polarizing sights in Manhattan this spring were the Madison Avenue windows of Barneys New York, an unlikely showcase for a series of mannequins. They were ringers for the real-life models who stalked the Hood by Air men’s runway in January, right down to their elaborate tattoos and the uncanny grillwork distorting their grins.During a recent week, passers-by stood welded to the spot, challenged to make what they could of the scene, a curious hybrid of street theater and fashion porn. “Obviously, this was done by an artist,” Paul Roberts, a visitor from Edinburgh, said appreciatively. “It goes beyond window dressing, doesn’t it?”But Claudia Brien, a young Upper East Side matron, pronounced those vitrines “beyond disgusting.”“I pass them most days, but I go out of my way to keep my children away,” Ms. Brien said.Love them or loathe them, the windows, their mannequins lurching toward spectators, lips ringed in jeweled pacifiers, “skin” elaborately inked, were a come-on. They were as surely a testament to a widening fascination with body modification in its most eye-popping extremes: allover tattoos, subdermal implants, piercing, stretching, scarring, branding and the like.Photo

The Madison Avenue windows of Barneys New York, filled with re-creations of tattooed and pierced models from Hood by Air’s spring 2016 show. CreditYana Paskova for The New York TimesShayne Oliver, the chief creative force behind Hood by Air, has been quick to exploit that fascination. Of a piece with his musical collaborations on and off the runway, the display was a calculated provocation, in tune, as Mr. Oliver likes to say, with “the language of flamboyancy, the language of exaggeration.”At the same time, the windows “opened a door to a very interesting dialogue,” said Dennis Freedman, the Barneys creative director. “You start to become familiar with something that at first might be frightening. But I suspect that, over time, people do acclimate.”As they say, the eye adjusts. Facial and body piercings, ear gauging, dental grills and tribal ink were once the province of so-called deviant or subversive subcultures. Explorations of extreme body modification, a practice so widespread in some circles that it was deemed a movement, have been lavishly documented in books like the 1989 body-mod bible “Modern Primitives.”Continue reading the main story

FROM OUR ADVERTISERS

RECENT COMMENTS

Donald Seekins 42 minutes ago

I hope none of the people with extensive tattoos want to live and work in Japan. In that country, anyone with tattoos is associated with the...

Joe Sabin 1 hour ago

I was walking behind a couple last week. I felt bad for him as he had what looked like disfiguring scars on his legs. (I'm in FL, shorts for...

dark brown ink 4 hours ago

Snarky old person comment:Amazing art, yes. But the ink is toxic; shows up in autopsies, bad for the liver. There are some organic...

SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT

Inspired by Fakir Musafar, a performance artist and leading proponent of the modern primitive movement, the book is filled with photographs of Mr. Musafar recontouring his waist and extremities with tight metal bands, or hanging by flesh hooks from a tree.There are images as well of Leo Zulueta, a tattoo artist stamped with a brash chevron-like pattern that enhances the contours of his back.Photo

image：KissyProm backless prom dresses

FKA Twigs at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this month.CreditLarry Busacca/Getty ImagesTattooing and high-visibility piercing, resurgent in the early 1990s as the seditious insignia of proud outliers, are now being revisited in unlikely quarters.“We’re seeing a lot of people who probably would have never set foot into a piercing studio,” said Miro Hernandez, a spokesman for the Association of Professional Piercers and a partner in Dandyland, a piercing studio in San Antonio. “We’re seeing business professionals, doctors, nurses and teachers more discerning about what to look for and what to choose.”Indeed, the continuing appropriation — commodification, some might say — of this former taboo by fashion designers, celebrities and civilians alike suggests that it has made deep incursions not just into the mainstream, but also into the consciousness, and the pocketbooks, of a moneyed elite.“In an era of excessive individualism, our markings and modifications are viewed not as a sign of freakishness or outlier tendencies but as an expression of personal taste,” Christine Rosen, a cultural historian, wrote last year in The Hedgehog Review, a journal of cultural criticism. Ms. Rosen went on to suggest that tweaking the skin one is in has become a leisure pursuit no more alien or off-putting than, say, a Botox party.“Today ‘it was spring break’ is just as likely to be the answer to the question of why someone got tattooed as ‘I was in prison’ was for previous generations,” she writes.

Related：KissyProm green prom dresses