We’re all used to the women’s fashion and style pages getting a little more interested in erotic clothing as Christmas approaches. It’s that time of the year when the media fashionistas are most likely to mention lingerie, stockings, high heels and other kinds of sexy garb without the accompaniment of involuntary shuddering.
However, I have to say that the Sunday Times Style supplement excelled itself with its December 17 spread The good, the bad and the kinky. Teasing us with a contents-page picture by Perou of Midori in her legendary latex kimono of a few Rubber Balls ago (left), the magazine declares: “Fetish fashion is having a moment. But where is it coming from?”
The answer, according to the piece’s author Tony Marcus, is Torture Garden. Which is handy, because almost the entire piece is devoted to his account of a visit to one of TG’s parties at Mass in Brixton. Here, the writer, clad in an electric blue bridesmaid’s dress and hold-up stockings, encountered “insect-shiny catwomen” in black catsuits on the door, before entering the main dance area populated by “a lot of stern looking ladies in rubber skirts, high heels, high heels, high boots, tight corsets and rubber nurse outfits”. Who would have believed it, at Torture Garden, eh?
Soon. of course, Marcus is tackling the thorny question of just how much pain and pleasure is actually there for the taking. Every journalist writing about fetish clubs for the vanilla press always has to address this issue. And, like so many of his profession who’ve trod this road before him, he seemed a little disappointed by the lack of the kind of debauchery he’d hoped to find at TG. Marcus felt most of the club’s denizens weren’t doing “anything particularly frightening” but admitted there was still a “whiff of latent danger” in the air. Interestingly, he decided it was “all a bit public school in the days of coroporal punishment”, an accusation I doubt has ever before been levelled at TG of all organisations. Makes you wonder just which public school Marcus went to, yah?
Contrary to the promise of the subheading, the piece doesn’t actually establish the connection between what goes on at TG and current mainstream manifestations of kinkery such as Gareth Pugh’s fetishistic catwalk fashion, Sienna Miller sporting a harness, Dolce & Gabbana’s SM-inspired spring collection and “every second woman on the Tube” wearing boots redolent of female domination. However, it does have a happy ending of sorts, when Marcus finds himself being chatted up by a girl who says she likes to whip men. Not at TG and not in public, you understand — but the writer concludes that he “could, I imagine, arrange to see this girl again”. So it isn’t all just make-believe then.
Comments