Justin Bieber’s ‘V’ spread: high fashion or faux pas?

Those of us who were once young girls would plaster our walls with posters of hunky heartthrobs, ripping pages from our latest Tiger Beat violently taping it to our bedroom walls.

In these posters, even the most sensitive of ‘pretty boys’ butched up their image, with wifebeaters, ripped jeans and their meanest glare. The transformation looks a bit silly in retrospect (Justin Timberlake in cornrows?) but its efficacy cannot be denied.

Justin Bieber, meanwhile, has decided another to take a different approach.

In what seems to have been an attempt at high fashion, Bieber appears in new photos for V magazine wearing anything from a metallic vest suit to a broken gladiator helmet. The result is a sexually-ambiguous Bieber who looks just a tad like Julie Andrews. (Not that looking like Julie Andrews is bad!) The shots, with Metro commentary below:

Bieber didn’t originally want to appear on the V cover, so the magazine had to catch him in a net first.

Here Bieber is purposefully evoking the Roman emperor Augustus, who was also famous for his earrings.

Now these photos are just getting silly. What kind of robot doesn’t pull his pants up?

There’s definitely some waxing going on in Bieber’s routine.

If Sinead O’Connor and Elvis had a baby, it would look like this.

We’ve returned to the Roman theme. Truly, Justin Beiber is a gladiator of our cultural landscape, fighting for truth and justice in the face of all the haters.

We call this look “Top Gun meets rug.”

The cover of Bieber’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”-themed concept album.

The spread was photographed by Inez & Vinoodh and styled by Lady Gaga associate Nicola Formichetti, which offers a window into the mind of the artists behind the looks.

While we found the getups to be both inconsistent and perhaps a tad silly, we recognize that art is subjective. So what do you think? Ridiculous? Or visionary?