A couple of months ago Eleganza invited its devoted readership to send in photographs of themselves for possible publication. Careers in modeling beckoned, if not in major motion pictures. Response was overwhelming, and a veritable battalion of freelance fashion experts had to be hired—at no little personal expense to the author—to sort through endless truckloads of letters and photographs, many of them taken—at no little personal expense to those photographed — by top professional lenspersons.

Now, at last, though, we have a winner, the fetching and fabulous Ms. Gail Warning from Anytown, USA (she forgot to enclose her return address, not to mention such vital facts as age, race, height, weight, creed, color). What she didn't neglect to mention—and how—is her devotion to the music of a local Anytown group called the Chesterfield Kings, who wear their hair as Brian Jones did in 1965 and who, if their music is as droll as their name, are a group to watch and listen for in the months to come.

In the perfumed note Gail enclosed with her first-place-winning photograph—a Polaroid snapshot of herself (which, also, proved as unreproducible as it was unpretentious)—she notes that she's very, very big on fringe. It's easy to see why, too. She wears the stuff so well as to make one believe that it could be on the verge of regaining the popularity it last enjoyed after Roger Daltrey appeared at Woodstock in that famous buckskin number.

If Gail Warning's selection as Eleganza's Reader of the Year is this month's good news, the bad is the profound disgruntlement of hundreds of other readers who've written in to assert that the real 'hideous little dwarf' to whom Eleganza alluded in one of its recent diatribes against heavy metal isn't Ronnie Dio at all, but the author's own procreative appendage! A recent missive from Nikki Chrissman of Northridge, California, so cogently states the offended readers' case against this column that it deserves to be reproduced here in full.

'I really think that your article called Eleganza SUCKED!!!' Nikki writes in a bold, assertive hand on lined three-hole notebook paper much like that found in any American junior high school. 'All anybody does these days is put down Heavy Metalers and the way they dress. What is wrong with a Concert shirt and jeans or leather? It's a hell of a lot better than the TACKY stripes, polka dots, and blinding colors that new-wavers wear.

'Why do they put down Iron Maiden? Why not Michael Jackson? Iron Maiden could blow Michael Jackson off the face of the earth any day. Bruce Dickinson doesn't have to listen to his records because he knows they're good. Also, heavy metal guitarists sure as hell aren't assholes. These Eleganza people are. Heavy Metal guitarists are at least 10 times better than classical guitarists could ever be.

'There is also nothing wrong with Ronnie Dio's voice. If anybody's voice is bad, it's Michael Jackson. If Ronnie Dio is a hideous little dwarf, I'd really hate to see these Eleganza ASSHOLES!!! Heavy Metal fans don't have to think they're bad because we know we are. There is nothing wrong with spiked leather. As a matter of fact, Heavy Metal bands are bitchen! A lot more bitchen than these Eleganza losers!

'How in the hell would Eleganza know the 'ultra-bad and macho-guys' are scared to death of women? They're just jealous because they're ug/y wimps. Maybe if you stopped printing articles like these, your magazine might sell better. I know you probably won't print this, but all I can say is DEATH TO ELEGANZA!!!!!'

Feeling as chastened as I do, I can muster a response to only one point—that having to do with how I know heavy metal fans are scared to death of women. I know that they are because I conducted a poll at last year's US Festival's Heavy Metal Sunday. Of the 328 studbraceletted boys in 1971 haircuts I asked, 'Are you secretly terrified of women in spite of your affectations of machismo?' no fewer than 216, or 65.8%, admitted that they were. You have to admire their candor, Nikki.

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Speaking of haircuts, have you gotten a load of the hair on these boys from Wales, these new purveyors of The New Idealism called the Alarm? Eddie MacDonald, whose picture hairspray manufacturers will soon be carrying in their wallets if the band gets much more popular, looks like The Ronettes Meet The Wild Things, the latter having been a band that got itself an Elektra Records recording contract in the very late '60s solely on the basis of having the most gapeinducingly gigantic pompadours anyone had ever seen. I mean, on the best day in his hair's history, these guys would have made Brian Setzer look like Phil Collins. The Ronettes you've heard of.

In their army boots and black leather jackets and trousers with millions of zippers and peroxided orange hair, those traditional icons of punk, the 1984 Clash—allowing for personnel changes— look more like the 1976 Clash from an Eleganza point of view than any group ever has threequarters of a decade after the fact.

'You don't discover and participate in the creation of a culture every fucking week,' jovial Joe Strummer explained to Eleganza when we chatted recently in Santa Barbara at the behest of a rival rag. 'When you abandon your culture, you don't know what you've lost 'til it's gone,' Joe continued. 'After a few years (those during which the boys experimented with various variations on the basic '50s look), we could see that we'd had a culture, but that we'd abandoned it.' At which point, out again came the army boots and black leather jackets and trousers with millions of zippers and peroxided orange hair, those traditional icons of punk.

Eleganza finds such literalness alarming. Can you imagine how discombobulating it would have been if the Beatles had worn collarless Pierre Cardin suits of the sort they wore in the first publicity photos for which they posed after Brian Epstein tidied them up in Let It Be? How about if the Stones, at Altamont, had worn mismatched suits and sports jackets and dress shirts without ties? Or the Kinks, in the days of Everybody's In Showbiz, the maroon hunting jackets and frilly shirts in which they outraged and astonished the whole pop world in 1965?

You might already have learned this in civics, but it bears repeating. It isn't a straight line, but a circle, that best represents the spectrum of political leanings. Hence, in rock 'n' roll fashion, as in politics, the extreme left wing, as represented in the former by punk, actually has very much more to do with the extreme right wing, as represented by heavy metal, than either has to do with anything in the middle. Indeed, speaking in a non-fashion sense for just a millisecond or two, I've always held that the only difference between punk and heavy metal is that those who opt for the former haven't the technical facility of those who opt for the latter. For which they make up—and may Nikki Chrissman write me another letter if I'm mistaken—by not being quite as terrified of girls.

In closing, I'd just like to note that the funniest thing in rock 'n' roll fashion these days is the slavishness with which the heavy metal hordes of Southern California dress exactly like one another. There's a free bi-weekly magazine called BAM (for Bay Area music) out on this edge of the country that apparently offers very accommodating rates to groups who want to advertise themselves in it. All the heavy metal ones have these really fearsome names, and pose for their pictures in the identical studded bracelets and dog collars, handcuff belts, 1971 haircuts, snarls, pouts, and leers. The only one that I've seen that stands out even slightly from the rest calls itself Bitch, apparently after its female lead singer. Whose principal onstage shtick, as I understand it, is kicking around a muscleman in bondage to the strains of an original song (I've never heard it, but I don't suspect that one really has to know exactly how it sounds) called 'Be My Slave.'

My question is this—in view of how much the heavy metal sexes seem to detest one another, what hope can there be for a next generation of stud-braceletted snarlers and leerers?