Updated January 1 2007
I’ve been a ‘perv pundit’ associated with high-end fetish publishing for more than 20 years now.
Until recently I was editor (and also a director) of Skin Two, widely regarded as the world’s most stylish and authoritative fetish magazine. I was for many years a director of Skin Two’s fetish clothing manufacture and retail businesses, and provided regular creative input for its big annual London event, the Rubber Ball Weekend. I am now about to launch my own fetish webzine called The Fetishistas.
My association with the Skin Two phenomenon predates the magazine. It began when, as a senior journalist on the London music weekly Sounds, I became part of a small group of media, music, art and fashion people who helped launch the original ‘rubber club’ that bore the name, in Soho in 1983. I began contributing to the magazine after its first issue in 1984, and watched a movement that started as a darker spin-off from the New Romantic scene develop over the next ten years into a fully-fledged international subculture with its own clubs, clothing labels, shops, artists, models, photographers and magazines.
Skin Two was right at the heart of this cultural explosion, so I was perfectly placed to document, influence and participate in it. I gave up music journalism entirely in the early 1990s to become a full-time ‘professional perv’, and up to my departure earlier in 2006, led the small editorial team that successfully maintained the magazine’s reputation as the best in its field.
As well as producing magazines and newspapers and contributing to various books, I’ve edited two best-selling coffee-table fetish photo anthologies, ‘Fetish’ and ‘Sex: Take A Walk On The Wild Side’, for Carlton Books/Thunder’s Mouth Press. Further books are in the pipeline.
Today, post-Skin Two, I remain as enthusiastic as ever about everything that goes on in the global fetish community, and in particular, I still get enormous pleasure from the discovery of fresh fetish talent and the promotion of the best of the scene’s creative endeavours.
My continued commitment to pervy publishing will very soon manifest itself at TheFetishistas.com, a new fetish webzine under my ownership and editorship. This big online project will combine the best elements of traditional fetish print magazines with the immediacy, interactivity and unrestricted breadth and depth of content that is only possible with the web, to offer unrivalled free coverage of the international fetish scene to all.
My Fetish Dayz blog, meanwhile, gives me the opportunity to sound-off on a wide variety of topical fetish-related matters and, particularly, to reflect on the numerous ways fetish crops up in mainstream media and culture. So Fetish Dayz will continue in parallel with The Fetishistas after the new webzine goes live, though other items such as reviews and features will in future appear on the magazine site.
For networking enthusiasts, I can also be found on MySpace at: www.myspace.com/tony_mitchell
and on Model Mayhem at The Fetishistas: www.modelmayhem.com/member.php?id=246311
