People have all the time had an affinity for fetishism, long before we had iPhones, latex dresses and spiky high heels. In ancient cultures, the word fetish meant “inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers”. Within the twentieth century, it evolved to mean a type of sexual desire strongly linked to a selected object, which was pathologised, stigmatised and ultimately rejected by society. Fetishism was a grimy secret concealed behind closed doors – and thru revolting the conformists, it has naturally attracted artistic outlaws and rebels of all types. 

For the reason that Seventies, visual iconography of fetish has permeated contemporary art, fashion and popular culture: from rubber outfits in Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique to killer heels to Helmut Newton’s photographs to the art world disruptors like Bob Flanagan, Tom of Finland, or Reba Maybury (drop by Hardcore exhibition at London’s Sadie Coles for a punchy tackle transgressive sexuality today). For a very long time, the artistic realm of fetishism was dominated by the male gaze, but within the twenty first century, diverse visions and desires are coming to the surface, alongside the testaments to its queer history and links to the leather community. 

The stories we’ve got chosen from the Dazed Digital archive should not about fetish as an aesthetic – each of them explores the depth of the particular practice, the nuanced human sexuality, the history at play, and the communities which gravitate towards highly-eroticised objects and spaces. They provide a chance to shake off prudence and prejudice – and fearlessly interrogate your individual desire. 

In 1993, photographer Ilana Rose first walked into Hellfire, Melbourne’s fetish nightclub, and was immediately mesmerised by the group. “We got in and everybody was totally dressed – that’s the very first thing we noticed. It was just essentially the most amazing tackle S&M fashion, so heaps of plastic, vinyl, plenty of leather and studs and everybody strutting their stuff. The music was pumping and the whole lot was great,” she remembers. 

Hellfire first opened in 1992 and was a fixture of Melbourne’s 90s nightlife each Sunday night for ten years. It was an area of sexual liberation and experimentation which attracted party-goers, fetishists and kinksters alike. Rose documented all of them on the dancefloor and through erotic play – a novel insight into Australia’s sexual underground which existed on the verge of fetishism and club subcultures. 

Fetishes should not all the time linked to dungeon-like imagery and dark nightclubs – they can be obscure and have their very own self-contained visual language. Reba Maybury, artist, dominatrix and the founding father of Wet Satin Press, explored the private desires of men on the Web through a series of zines published in 2015. It was the foray into something so completely faraway from what’s perceived as sexy, yet still seriously erotic, that inspired Reba to interview each man and document each fetish. Each interview with an anonymous man reveals a really personal desire: A person’s fetish for girls wearing office-appropriate heels submerged into water, A 60-year-old man’s ritualistic fetish for wearing nylon on his face at home, and A person’s fetish for the air bubbles trapped inside women’s dresses while swimming.

“The rationale we desired to publish these into print was because their imagery is so outstandingly original,” says Maybury. “Their creation and existence verge on the boundaries of folks art slightly than that of the quantity of commercially sensational pornography that we are actually so numbed to. All gendered and sexual stereotypes disappear and we’re left with a utopian vision of harmless but fascinating eroticism which makes us query ourselves.” 

London-based Sensored magazine emerged as a keep off against online censorship of sexuality and the body. Photographer Tom Selmon began the project within the lockdown, in search of to regain agency which he felt was taken away in the web spaces – and create a platform for other erotic creators to specific themselves freely. “It’s an ode to the great thing about the erotic. It has no boundaries or limitations with the bodies we show and the way explicitly we show them,” he says. “It features contributors from world wide, all giving their very own unique, uncensored, and private interpretation of sex and nudity, acting as a time capsule of artistic expression inside erotica today.” Sensored also emphasises the connection between sexuality and selfhood, especially for those practicing fetishism and the queer leather communities. 

While fetishism is usually focused on objects, it also expands the realm of which parts of the body we’re culturally allowed to eroticise. Foot fetish, which is usually dubbed essentially the most common of all, was a strict taboo for essentially the most of the twentieth century. American photographer Elmer Batters was one in all the disruptors who approached it artistically, creating erotic imagery which suited his sexual calling. Batters’s journey wasn’t easy: bubbed ‘dangerously perverse’ by the legal system, the photographer was arrested for publishing his fetish mags Man’s favorite Pastime and Black Silk Stockings. Although the magazines were specializing in legs and feet, versus what’s traditionally understood as nudity, it was his exploratory erotic gaze which has set off the alarms of the establishment. Batters’s work has since been exhibited and recognised for its artistic merit.  

British photographer Polly Borland has all the time specialised within the offbeat, surreal and fringe. So when she heard a couple of secret club through which adult men spent weeks looking and living like babies, she first could hardly consider it  – but then got down to document it. She photographed Hush-a-Bye-Baby Club in Gillingham, Kent, a sanctuary for individuals who desired to explore adult baby play.  Her book, The Babies, was published in 2001 by powerHouse Books, featuring 80 photographs taken over a five-year stretch, a foreword from Susan Sontag and the identical unflinching gaze from Borland’s lens. Versus the articles and ‘documentaries’ that may need introduced contemporary audiences to the phenomenon, Borland’s images transcend any type of ulterior narrative or judgement – a much-needed humanising perspective on the perimeter fetish. 

For her book Jaunt, German photographer Lotte Reimann used found imagery from a private erotic archive to construct a raw and emotive fictional narrative. She combined nude self-portraits with desert landscapes and automotive crashes – channeling her own sexual fantasies into it. “It’s a photographic ‘jaunt’ through lust in age, that’s neither linked to a specifically feminine or masculine desire, but to eroticism as an interpersonal phenomenon,” she explains.Taking close up shots of her computer screen, she rewrote the couple’s story with inspiration from J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash. “For me, personally, it isn’t just the crash I relate to sexuality, however the automotive itself. Metal, steel, glass, leather, plastic, oil, and dirt – all agglomerated into one piece, which encloses me – blasting with tremendous speed through the landscape, is hugely exciting, arousing.” 

The history of latex fetish is closely connected to the name of John Sutcliffe, a former aircraft engineer who took on making rubber and leather motorcycle gear in 1957. For 3 subsequent many years, he has designed clothes for leather, rubber and PVC fetishists, with an emphasis on catsuits, cloaks, and gasmasks. In 1972, he founded AtomAge magazine in his London headquarters. AtomAge featured illustrations, bondage and rubber themed erotica and photography – each skilled and amateur. Sutcliffe ran plenty of successful publishing project which essentially shaped the look of latex and rubber fashion on the time – and influenced generations of designers and image-makers to come back. Although AtomAge headquarters were raided by the police and his output shun by many as obscene, Sutcliffe has left a remarkable tracein the history of fetish.

In 2020, artist Ekaterina Bazhenova-Yamasaki and Resha Sharma of London-based leather brand Fleet Ilya joined forces to redefine the prevailing conventions of the erotic and fetish imagery. Of their book Atom, we see 4 ‘heroines’ (and the artist herself) wearing pieces by Fleet Ilya, including harnesses, corsets, leather lingerie, and collars, of their private spaces. Juxtaposed with still life images and shots of nature, the result’s intimate, tender, and immersive, and goes against the stereotypical idea of the feminine body and objects often related to fetish culture. Atom is a continuation of Bazhenova-Yamasaki’s artistic practice exploring desire, the body, and finding agency in a single’s sexual expression – and Fleet Ilya’s quest to reframe fetish as a tactile and embodied practice. 

Matt Ford’s long-term photo and video project VOYEUR, which he exhibited in London in 2022, is an ode to real people making the town’s kink scene. “Considered one of my initial goals was to go behind the trashy headlines and discover the actual human aspect of the kink scene,” Ford told Dazed. “I desired to have fun the community, and in addition show people outside it that simply because your [expression of] sexuality is different, it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything flawed.” From pro-dommes to rubber puppies, inflatables enthusiasts and content creators, it’s an evocative and earners portrait of the community. 

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