Striking Poses

'Vogue" as a verb has been around since the sixties and involves teams of mannequin wanna-bes ("voguers") competing against one another with choreographed sequences of fashionmagazine-inspired poses. Long restricted to the "balls" in Harlem, young men (mostly) now vogue regularly on the club circuit, inspired less by today's "real-life" cover girls than by yesterday's melodramatic glamour pusses who really knew how to work that camera. As if responding to David Hemmings' plea in Blow-Up to "work, work, work," the voguer "tumbles" balletically from an acrobatic Veruschka to a pouting Brooke to Iman (every voguer's idol) doing pretty much anything.

CHRISTA D'SOUZA