Dayton Schlosser

Biography

Most models make their entrance onto the fashion scene via a talent search or a casting office, or by being pulled aside in an airport lounge or off a city sidewalk- by agents who swear profusely that they aren't sniffing on them. Circumstances suggest the sexy rather than the cerebral.

But when Dayton Schlosser, who is one of fashion Guys for the autumn 2001, made his entrance onto the figurative catwalk, the setting was in fact intellectual, or at least bookish. He was exiting an ivied building at the Governor Durnmer Academy in the prepschool-rich comer of Massachusetts north of Boston. It was July of 2000. Dayton had just graduated from Salem State College and was teaching summer school before assuming a full-time position in the English department at Whittier Regional Technical High School in nearby Haverhill.

"I was walking outside with some students," Dayton says. "It was drizzling. All of a sudden, this guy comes up to me and starts asking about modeling."

The man in question was Sam Shahid, whose company handles Abercrombie & Fitch's advertising. He was at the school with photographer Bruce Weber to shoot one of the company's quarterlies. Shahid took Dayton-who, it turned out, had made an unsuccessful stab at modeling a few years earlier--over to the photographer within hours, the young teacher was stripped to his skivvies, being shot on the school lawn while his students watched wide-eyed. We are worlds away from the prep-school days of A Separate Peace or The Catcher in the Rye, when the idea that an instructor would remove his blazer and tie, even while sleeping, was unthinkable.

Flash-forward a year, to New York, where Dayton is one of the men of the moment, a 24 year-old with a face that, because of its appearance in campaigns for Abercrombie and for Chaps, is leaving its mark. Dayton is extremely companionable. He is not simply one more genetically blessed, verbally stunted guy who gravitated toward the fashion world to get laid. In person it is not only the face, with its ruddy coloring (a product of German and Hungarian lineage), or the body (made by years of skateboarding and martial arts) that makes an impression. It is Dayton's romantic spirit.

Dayton has an enriched imagination. Since fourth grade, he has steeped himself in Roman and Egyptian mythology and in Joseph Campbell's work on the hero, and he has explored the normally nerd-associated region of Dungeons & Dragons. These things combine to lend Dayton an aura of the all-American boy, at least in its Caucasian version, with its secret bonds of male comradeship, its prizing of self reliance and Willpower, and an exaltation of purity of thought: Dayton has even tattooed "FXE" prominently on his back, which stands for "straight edge" and means that he has pledged himself to sobriety. (He's also a vegetarian.) As I walk around Manhattan streets with him, noticing some passersby rationing the number of hungry glances they aim in his direction, and others, Eke a gay gang we encounter one day outside a Chelsea coffee shop, appraising him ravenously, this Tolkien fan seems as chaste as a hobbit-a handsome hobbit.

But Dayton's no boy scout. You sense that he could hold a monumental grudge, that his open mood conceals an occasional Heathdiffian brood. In his pictures-if not in his person, where he's so polite and enthusiastic, you'd feel guilty for tendering a proposition-there is an awareness of sex just under the diffused, dreamy sensuality. He conveys both "the savage and the civilized"-a phrase once used by Balzac to describe Hawkeye, the Deerslayer of James Fenimore Cooper.

Invokeing the 19th-century author is for two reasons. First, family. Dayton, who grew up in Merrimac, Mass., and survived the early stresses of a household with pre-AA parents and two younger brothers, was, he thought until recently, named after an ancestor who governed New York around the Fenimore Cooper era. And second, since Dayton has made such a study of the hero, who better to mention in an account of him than one of the first great white heroes of American storytelling?

The Dayton dichotomy-not just the ability to reflect both the savage and the civilized but his charmingly balanced appeal to men and women, gays and straights-was immediately obvious to Abercrombie's Shahid, who says, "Dayton reflects his generation, which makes relatively few separations in terms of identity."