The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes — Bonami & Simons, eds. (Charta / Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery, 2003)

The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes
Edited by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons
Charta / Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery, 2003
TNR-2026-0663

20 × 25.5 cm
440 pp.
Softcover
English
359 illustrations, 292 in colour
ISBN 88-8158-404-2 / 978-88-8158-404-8

Catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at Stazione Leopolda, Florence, 9 January–9 February 2003, staged during Pitti Immagine Uomo and co-curated by the art curator Francesco Bonami and the fashion designer Raf Simons, three years before Simons's Jil Sander appointment and deep into the run of collections (Riot Riot Riot, Consumed, Woe onto Those Who Spit on the Fear Generation) that had already made teenage subculture his most explicit subject.

The premise, stated in the book's own back-cover text: if male, female and homosexual are read as the first three sexes, adolescence is a fourth — not a gender category but a state, "sexually undefined," neither child nor adult, "a parallel, fluid universe in a state of becoming." Simons was on record with the New York Times at the time refusing to fix adolescence to an age bracket at all, framing the show as an atmosphere to be entered rather than a demographic to be defined.

The anthology built around that premise runs literature alongside image: David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, Arata Isozaki and Dennis Cooper appear in the text pages; Marilyn Manson contributes an essay on conformity; Richard Billingham's photographic work was among the pieces shown at Leopolda and reproduced here. The book pairs that literary register against fashion and brand imagery spanning Malcolm McLaren, Comme des Garçons, Katharine Hamnett, Benetton and Diesel — teenage rebellion and teenage-as-market-segment held in the same frame without much editorial comment on the tension between them.

That tension is really the object's own argument. A book about adolescence as something irreducible to marketing, published by a fashion foundation, edited by a designer whose collections were at that moment doing exactly the packaging the text claims to interrogate. The cover doesn't resolve this — a cropped, deadpan studio portrait of a young man, a crude cartoon face scrawled directly over his own, half his features effaced by someone else's drawing of an expression.

Condition: [to confirm against the physical copy in hand — light edge wear and a spine crease are visible in the reference photos]

The New Rare at Glue Book Fair 2026