Fetish Dayz

Launch of ‘The Fetishistas’ at LA Kink Ball Weekend

The fetish webzine project that I’ve been working on since my departure from Skin Two at the end of May last year is about to go live. Launch of the webzine The Fetishistas will happen during the first Los Angeles Kink Ball Weekend in mid-February. The site will officially go live on Friday February 16 at Slave2Fashion, the opening event of the weekend, at Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Boulevard.

I was very pleased when I heard last summer that LA was going to get a proper European-style fetish weekend in early 2007, and I happily made a commitment on behalf of my as-yet-to-be launched ’zine to support it. Why? My last four years editing of Skin Two magazine had seen me forging a strong relationship with Los Angeles’ growing community of fetish creatives. Looking back on LA’s emergence as a fetish force, it seems almost as if someone must have thrown a switch to produce the surge in the quality and quantity of work that I observed coming out of the area over that period. But I think the truth is more that this great mass of fetish talent had been simmering quietly away for quite some time, and what it needed was for publications like mine to take notice.

I’m the first to say that London can teach the rest of the world a few tricks when it comes to playing home to more top-drawer designers and international-standard events than anywhere else. But I can’t help also feeling great affection for this new West Coast scene — a scene I’ve witnessed blossoming rather as I watched the London scene grow from its roots in a single Soho club in 1983.

I had originally thought that by the time the LA Kink Ball came around in mid February, The Fetishistas would have been online for two or three months. But getting this big project off the ground has turned out to be more complex than predicted (quelle surprise) and so we find ourselves in January 2007 still working on getting everything just as we want it. Though delays are never desirable, in this case they have at least had the positive effect of enabling me to tie The Fetishistas launch date in with the other very significant launch of early 2007. Both these ventures — webzine and weekend — are, I would suggest, important milestones for the international fetish community. Los Angeles finally gets a full-scale perv-fest that befits its importance as a centre of kinky excellence, and the world gets its first truly world-class online fetish magazine.

I know Los Angeleans will turn out in force to support their own weekend, but I’m expecting also to see a lot of old friends from further afield, not to mention some of my many new MySpace and ModelMayhem mates from near and far. I’m sure a lot of people are disappointed that there’s no San Francisco Fetish Ball this year, but in its absence, the LA weekend this February could be just the way to get your first fix of West Coast fetish fun in 2007.

As for the launch party itself, well, reflecting the London-based but shamelessly internationalist outlook of The Fetishistas, Friday night’s Slave2Fashion brings strict dresscode European pervy partying style to Los Angeles, with latex fashion shows from UK labels House of Harlot, Torture Garden Clothing and Pretty Pervy, plus distinctive pvc designs from Germany’s Tatjana Warnecke. With its ambient/chill-out/trip-hop musical backdrop, the night aims to provide the perfect vibe for socialising and networking. It promises to be a particularly good promotional opportunity for models, with the chance to show off their hottest outfits and be photographed for the world’s Fetish Press. And of course there’ll be the bonus of seeing, in the flesh, famous fetish fashion labels never before brought to the Los Angeles stage.

In case my presence alone is not enough, The Fetishistas’ team at Slave2Fashion will also include several of the webzine’s much better-looking contributors, who’ll be participating in the fashion performances. Look out for such launch edition luminaries as Los Angeles’ very own Ms Marina, Chicago’s VonLivid and Miami’s Jolie Vaughn among the fashionistas strutting their stuff for your entertainment.

It promises to be quite a night — and quite a weekend. I hope as many of you as possible will turn out to support it. See you there!

www.lakinkball.com
www.thefetishistas.com (goes live Feb 16)

Ugly Betty poses some interesting questions for Brits

I don’t know what it was like when Ugly Betty first made it onto US TV screens. But anticipation levels for her New Year debut here in the UK were extremely high, with television pundits falling over themselves to tip the show as the new hottie for Friday nights, and Betty herself (actress America Ferrera, above) as the coolest anti-heroine since Roseanne.

I wondered if the programme (shown here on Channel 4 and E4) would provide any legitimate fetish angles for this column. Fortunately the very first episode did just that when Betty, the newly-appointed, less-than-fashionable assistant to a New York fashion magazine publisher, was humiliated in fetish attire while performing model stand-in duties on a magazine photo shoot.

Betty makes her entrance as magazine photo-shoot stand-in for absent model

Now, allegedly, Ugly Betty is full of irony, or at least what passes for irony in American television. ‘Not especially beautiful girl gets job on fashion magazine and is good at it’ may be just about as ironic as things can get in a country often considered an irony-free zone. This being the case, it was hard for me to decide whether the tacky, plasticky dominatrix gear that Betty and the ‘real’ models were forced to wear for the photo shoot was part of the show’s conscious irony or not.

I wondered where they’d got this stuff from, and the end credits suggested an answer. The programme’s costume designer is none other than Patricia Field, who earned her television wings providing outfits for that earlier New York ‘fashion television’ confection, Sex And The City, and more recently had designs featured in movie The Devil Wears Prada. I suppose Field’s style (which, as a result of encounters with her downtown Manhattan store in the early 1980s, I always think of as having its roots in TV of a rather different kind) is not entirely inappropriate to this sort of lightweight fairy story fodder. I can’t help wondering, though, what kind of a look the show might have, overall, if its producers involved a designer with less of a ‘Hollywood glamour’ take on fashion.

 

Betty, dwarfed by ‘real’ models, is obliged to pose in tacky fetish gear

But will Betty be a big hit over here, and does it deserve to be? Well, given its stylistic similarities to Sex And The City and Desperate Housewives, it could easily enjoy the same kind of popularity as they have. We’ll probably all watch the first series because there’ll probably be enough originality in it to keep things fresh, but as the novelty wears off, and the fund of simple morality tales dries up, our interest might not be sustained.

But I could be wrong. I actually do like the Betty character, so I want to see what they do with her. And unlike esteemed British TV critic AA Gill, I don’t find the ‘real’ irony in this programme to be the fact that Americans think that placing an ‘ordinary’ person in a ‘glamorous’ setting is in itself so inventive as to be revolutionary. AA may have forgotten that Ugly Betty is not an American creation at all; she started out as Colombian TV soap character Betty La Fea, and from there the concept has been appropriated and adapted for television in about a dozen other countries including America — everywhere, in fact, from Germany to India. So the Ugly Betty we’re seeing here in the UK is not a Hollywood original but an example of US studios doing what they do all the time — remaking someone else’s ideas.

Humiliated, Betty flees the photo studio pursued by her boss

But I do find it interesting that in all of these remakes, the actress chosen to play Betty is in reality (just as America Ferrera is in the US version) somewhere between very attractive and stunningly beautiful, and has to be ‘made ugly’ to play the part. Why? Why couldn’t any of these programme makers have had the guts to cast a genuinely plain Jane in the lead role? Why has it become the rule with this show, wherever it is remade, that the only way to create an ‘ordinary’ woman suitable for the rôle is to de-beautify a beautiful one? That, I think, is a far more telling indictment of the mindset behind the whole conceit.

Ironically the best chance of a plain Jane playing Betty would be if we made our own version of the show right here in the UK. British television is renowned for featuring, in starring roles and especially in soaps, plenty of ordinary-looking people, not to mention a fair smattering of genuine baby-frighteners. But that is also why a British remake of this show was probably never on the cards. Precisely because British television has been embracing ‘ordinariness’ (or what we like to call ‘realism’) with enthusiasm since the 1960s, today’s UK audiences would just not see anything remarkable in a short, slightly chubby girl with braces on her teeth getting a job on a British magazine.

Fortunately for Betty, though, we are still willing to suspend disbelief if she appears on our screens in a more appropriate cultural context — to wit, one where (we are led to believe) perfect teeth really can get you further than a perfect mind.

www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/U/ugly_betty/   

How Fetish Conquered The World

The holiday period TV repeats gave me the opportunity, finally, to watch the (UK) Channel 5 documentary How Fetish Conquered The World, which I’d missed on its first screening earlier in the year.

Although I didn’t appear in this programme, it looked suspiciously, from the general tone and content, like the one that I was interviewed for towards the end of 2005. And sure enough, when the credits rolled at the end, there I was, wrongly spelt as Tony Michell but nevertheless acknowledged for my (invisible) contribution. But believe me, I’m not just trying to put a brave face on things when I say I’m grateful for my non-appearance. I had plugged my old firm Skin Two throughout the interview and was not looking forward to seeing myself promoting an organisation that had subsequently dispensed  with my services.

Anyway, even without any soundbites from moi in it, How Fetish Conquered The World has to rank as one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen on fetishism and BDSM. It was authoritative, non-judgemental, non-sensationalist, full of interesting opinion and analysis, and packed with hot visuals, a few of which I’ve included here.

L-R: Mistress Margo & slave; Mistress Miyabe; ropemaster Akira Naka & model

Expertise was provided by some pretty heavyweight commentators from both sides of the Atlantic, including editor Diane Hanson, author Katherine Gates and photographer Eric Kroll from the US, and Wellcome Library archivist Dr Lesley Hall, film critic Derek Malcolm and the inimitable Germaine Greer from the UK. There were interviews with American and Japanese dominatrixes and slaves, British pony racing enthusiasts and inflatable latex lovers, and Japanese bondage practitioners. Clips were included from such seminal SM movies as Barbette Schroeder’s Maitresse, Just Jaeckin’s Story Of O and Masaru Konuma’s ground-breaking Wife To Be Sacrificed (Ikenie fujin).

L-R: Maitresse (1976); Story Of O (1975); Wife To Be Sacrificed (1974)

Never as far as I know released in the UK, but available on DVD from Kino.com in the US, the visually stunning Wife To Be Sacrificed, a product of the ailing 1970s Japanese movie industry’s move into so-called ‘pink film’, was one of several revelations delivered by this hour-long documentary.

Another came in the guise of latex-hooded-and-catsuited New York dominatrix Mistress Ayla (aka Ayla Alya) — see top picture and below. Her extreme medical scenes with a male slave and her interview pieces direct to camera had two very different tones, but were conducted with equally impressive panache. Definitely someone worth talking to for my upcoming webzine The Fetishistas. Unfortunately though, the lady seems, at least for the moment, to have disappeared off the face of the earth. If you’re out there somewhere Ayla, please get in touch!

L-R: Mistress Ayla and slave; The Other Pony Club; Mr Blow-Up

How Fetish Conquered The World was written and directed by Jim Funnell for independent London production company Illuminations, who were commissioned by Channel 5. At this point the show is not obtainable as a commercial DVD, but if it ever becomes available, it would be one for every perv to add to their collection. In the meantime, it’s certainly worth keeping an eye out for any re-appearances on TV.

www.channel5.com
www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk
www.kino.com
www.thefetishistas.com