Newsflash: Homeless People Can Be Attractive

It's well-established that homeless people, or rather, fabricated media amalgamations of homeless people, occasionally provide "inspiration" to fashion designers. We've covered everything from Vivienne Westwood's homeless chic menswear line to Barneys dumb mannequins-sleeping-under-newspapers store display to a homeless man's inclusion on the high fashion blog The Sartorialist. When will the pretty people learn?

Now comes a bizarre twist to the ongoing saga of street-homeless-as-fashion-muse: apparently several people in Ningbo, China have something of a crush on a homeless man there. He's part dirty bum, part James Dean -- what's not to love?

The breathless way his story is told in a British paper makes it sound like news that homeless people can be attractive. "The photograph shows a starkly handsome Chinese man walking with a model's measured gait, and wearing a rag-tag but well coordinated overcoat on top of a leather jacket. ... A band of web followers are calling him the coolest man in China," writes Britain's Telegraph (the article includes pictures). His photo was then Photoshopped onto runways, movie posters and the bodies of male models.

This speaks to the assumption that many people have that "homeless people" are some other breed, not a group made up of a representative swatch of the general population that has been evicted, is suffering from mental illness, or any of the other myriad reasons that one goes from housed to homeless overnight. If the people who marvel at a homeless man for dressing all in blue stopped to think about it, they'd probably acknowledge that the homeless population includes old people and young people, fat people and thin people, tall people and short people. Homelessness doesn't discriminate, not even for the most attractive.

Commenters on the website of the fashion magazine Blackbook had this to say about the Chinese man, who is reportedly suffering from severe mental illness: "He's more of a classic tramp than homeless: notice that he's perfectly shaven," "I love the top half layering, but the extra wide legs of his pants are just eh to me," "I do like his hair, I can't get my hair like his no matter how much product I put in it" and "I didn't know that a homeless man can look this hot."

The upside of the story -- besides, I guess, turning some people on -- is that the man, Cheng Guorong, was recognized on the internet by family members who had been looking for him and they reunited. Of course, now begins the long and grueling (not to mention unfashionable) process of returning to society.

Photo credit: IntangibleArts