"Showing skin and covering only certain parts with rubber pieces has never been as accepted as it is today in our society"
A few decades ago, gimp masks, leather straps, studs, harnesses, and latex pieces used to be available only in adult stores, not shown on runways and social media posts as we are seeing now – a big ‘Thank You’ to society evolving and being more open minded.
And as a bunch of designers have already picked up the aesthetic in the 1990s and used them in a variety of collections, fetish fashion has slowly found its way back to the red carpet and, most important, to the spotlights of thee Fashion pack.
But before we talk about the trend as it’s happening right now, let’s go back to its roots: initially, fetishwear was designed to sexually highlight certain body parts and even though there’s no known specific origin point, we know that it partly rose from post-World War II biker culture and the underground gay communities in the 1960s. With fetish fashion entering the western mainstream fashion there has been a clear shift of what a provocative or shocking outfit was and of what has become.
The spectre of fetish fashion has been part of our modern visual vocabulary for a while now, whether that’s the outfits in Cardi B’s WAP or Billie Eilish’s Vogue cover, and we have everything to believe that our continuous exposure to such items make them less and less shocking everyday. Showing skin and covering only certain parts with rubber pieces has never been as accepted as it is today in our society, so that plus our agony to be bold and reactive on this post-lockdown-era createes the perfect momento to get your chains, leather pieces and everythinh in latex – and rock it.