de zeen magazine
by Sam Jacob
Though we might try to frame it in more rational, objective terms, design culture is really nothing more than a highly complex, super-developed system of driven-by-object fetishism. It’s a world where objects take on meanings and significances far beyond the sum of their material form. Where things inert and external to us resonate deep within our psyche. As designer or consumer, we are drawn towards sensations – the sheen of a particular texture, a particular colourway, the way a particular door swings. We’ve all had it, that moment when we feel a desperate attraction to a thing, an uncontrollable desire for… it, whatever that ‘it’ might be.
In the everyday world these sensations are the subtext of objects. But in the explicit world of fetishes – the world of sex and kink – these tendencies come to the surface. Or rather become the surface. Here, trajectories of desire and the objects intersect without any need to sublimate. Desire is desire, not the circuitous set of relationships that usually flow around design. Here design gives (silicon) form to desire. These forms are, most often, highly specific and, it must be said, strange.
Browse the fetish section of specialist outlets and you’ll find a world of strange anachronisms. It’s a world of faux-medievalness, of studded leather and dungeons, of stocks and pillories, of old fashioned schoolroom discipline embodied by the cane, the obscure world of equestrianism represented in harnesses and riding crops, early 20th century warfare in gas masks and uniforms, anachronistic healthcare in medical play.
Think of the kink.com mansion. In 2006, the BDSM internet pornography producer bought the huge San Francisco Armory, a building whose castle-like appearance once related (perhaps) to its original use as an arsenal for the National Guard. If its aesthetic once suggested the grand history of military fortification, its architectural fantasy of medievalism, castles and prisons coupled with its dilapidated state was ripe for repurposing as BDSM backdrop. Architectural history here is not dry academia but a playground ripe with association for sexual fantasy.
It’s a mixed-up set of references for sure, a whirlwind tour through medieval punishment devices, feudalism, Tom Brown’s schooldays, stately homes and primitive chemical warfare. They are references that are almost exclusively fetish scene-centric and all things from a long-vanished past. The past seems to have a much stronger hold on our kinky psyche than the future.
It’s the same at the more vanilla end of the spectrum, too. Think of the way the underwear of the past has been recycled as a high-end product rich with contemporary ideas of desire. The stockings and corsets of, say Agent Provocateur, are the reality of the past recast as the fantasy of the present. What was once everyday practicality is remade as contemporary exception. Are these things intrinsically sexy? Or have all those buckles and clips gained an erotic charge they never had in their original incarnation? Or, have we, like Pavlov’s dog, simply been conditioned to find these things sexy?
We could ask the same of so much of the fantasy wardrobe. Cosplay basics such as school uniforms that are unlike school uniforms, nurses’ outfits that certainly don’t comply with contemporary NHS heath and safety standards. And French maids? How on earth did the image of French domestic service gain such global cultural traction? Very few of us, I would imagine, have any experience or even knowledge of the source of this fantasy. So why would these images resonate quite so deeply as they seem to?
Maybe it’s exactly the distance these images and scenarios have from everyday life that makes them ripe for re-imagining. Their contemporary redundancy and distance from everyday life allows our fetish fantasy imagination to re-inhabit them, provides the space for us to play out roles that are distinct from our normal life and to play out scenarios that would be entirely unacceptable elsewhere. It’s their rootedness in other spaces that imbues them with theatrical possibilities.
But there’s a greater bite to this world than just roleplay. The distance also provides something else: a safe, contained space where we can play out issues that are very much a part of real life. …