From Fetish Club to High Fashion Runways
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Brandishing riding crops and chains, model mistresses from Dolce & Gabbana brought sado-masochist style to Milan's catwalks yesterday.
"She's a dominatrix woman," designer Stefano Gabbana quipped backstage after showing the season's most sizzling collection of fetish fashion for autumn-winter 2007-08.
Women will have to whip themselves into shape to wear the curvaceous clothes, which combined Domenico Dolce's impeccable tailoring with Gabbana's irreverent, provocative styling.
D&G parade their preference for S&M
From a talk with Valerie Steele author of Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power:
What do you think about this emerging bondage/S&M theme at the Milan shows? Steele: It seems to me that many S&M things in fashion just act as a kind of shortcut or signal for 'This is ultra-sexy fashion'. It's not even perverse anymore. It's very visual and theatrical and conveys easily to the public that it's about sex. Most things like body exposure don't - that sort of ho-hum, underwear-as-outerwear doesn't but if you do really flagrant S&M references then Jo Average will go 'Oh yes right, that means it's sexy and hot'. I remember when, after Versace had done all those things back in the early 90s that were sexy and sort of fetish-y [a case in point, Liz Hurley's famous safety pin dress], I talked to real fetishists and I said, 'So, what did you think of Versace?' and they said, 'We hate it - because now you can't tell if someone's really into it or if they're just making a fashion statement'. And I think at this point it has spread so rapidly into just being vernacular for 'This means sexy'.
Oh bondage, up yours! From H&M to S&M on the winter runways
Visit my new site: Fetish Artists
