Those of you not versed in fetish and fantasy may soon find yourself skin deep in latex, as the world’s leading fetish club is attempting to bring latex to Manchester’s mainstream fashion scene.
Normally associated with bondage, whips and pain, latex has for a long time belonged to an underground scene of pleasure and suffering.
However, the prestigious fetish club Torture Garden has decided to break into the mainstream fashion market – right here in Manchester.
The club will be launching its new latex men’s wear line next month in an opulent event to satisfy all tastes or fetishes with djs, experimental performances and music.
MM caught up with Frankie Knuckles, a man who evades definition. As Jojo Bones’ manager, performance artist manager, promoter, fine artist, academic and Manchester’s partner to Torture Garden, he was the perfect person to talk about the club’s push to whip away fetish traditions and make latex a household item.
“Traditional fetish fashion is very limited. There are limitations on design, especially in men’s latex wear which are usually black and straight cut lines. Traditional fetish is more about play not dress,” he said.
However Frankie is working with a number of designers such as Stacey Black and the brand EUSTRATIA to showcase some more flamboyant and innovative designs.
He said: “We are trying to incorporate latex into mainstream fashion so we have gone for a more avant-garde approach. Instead of traditional black we use baby blues and pinks. These new designs are liberal with material and don’t shy away from asymmetrical lines.”
In fetish circles, traditional latex fits its purpose, stiff, suffocating; an outfit with the very core of fetishism at its centre – to punish and pleasure. Yet Frankie belies such misconceptions about this versatile and often misconstrued material.
He said: “There is so much more to latex. It’s pliable; it sculpts the body really well. Vivienne Westwood some years ago saw that sex is the thing that bugs people more than anything else and the connotations of fetish disturb ideas of sexual normality.
“Fashion to me has always been one of two things, an expression of self and an art form, to me latex allows such expression for both the designer and person wearing it, and when it comes to personal expression then sex is one of the main driving forces.”
TG has multi-platforms incorporating fetishism, art, and music. Founded in 1990 by Allen Pelling and David Wood, they sought to fill a void in alternative clubs.
The club was in fact named after the turn of the century novel by Octave Mirbeau, which was set in a chinese garden of torture. However it was chosen more because of the exotic and mysterious images that it evoked, rather than the specific novel itself.
Allen’s background was as an alternative club promoter and DJ in London, and David was a conceptual art and film graduate who had been going to fetish clubs since 1984. They were bored with the existing retro alternative clubs and suburban style fetish clubs.
They wanted to create a new kind of radical alternative fetish club that combined diverse and progressive music, multiple environments, fashion, performance, visuals and installations
A mere 100 people came to the first event at the Opera OnThe Green venue in a shopping precinct in Shepherds Bush on a Thursday night, but by the 5th there were 500 and it was rammed.
By this time TG had developed its own unique crowd that combined the alternative post-goth, hard-core SM, fetish fashion and gay and straight scenes, with the totally new body art and piercing scenes.
Throughout this time, a number of designers and creative greats passed through this hallowed Garden. Alexander McQueen has designed pieces for TG and Dita Von Tesse has performed at their club nights.
The current latex movement builds on the creative heritage at the centre of the club. In 2010s London Fashion week and the 2011 collaborative Vogue show latex was solidified as a fashion heavy weight.
Frankie said: “Galliano, Alexander McQueen and mainstream names like Gucci were using latex. It was no surprise that by 2013 it had filtered down into mainstream fashion and it started appearing.”
He added: “If one was to ask me whether I am indeed trying to make fetish mainstream then my answer would be it already is. For sexuality and libido, like Lacan surmised is active always but simply not noticed or seen. By providing the clothes we do at my boutique, we invite clients to seize a right of empowerment whilst still accommodating both aestheticism and dominance.
“I think that part of the speculation behind Miley Cyrus or Jessie J wearing latex is not one of disdain but one of concern from the archaic or oppressive for women are finally realizing their dominant position and marking this through sense of dress.”
Although relatively new to the world of Torture Garden, Manchester seems the perfect venue to launch this bold foray into mainstream fashion.
Frankie said: “The London scene is so homogenized. Manchester is very different. The crowd is more diverse. Age and gender demographics are vast. Newbies to young couples attend.
“I always liked Robert Stollers’ quote identifying fetish as ‘a story masquerading as an object’ and the people of the community as providing some of the greatest stories. I see myself as helping them to tell such stories by providing the objects to fetishise.”
Frankie summed up the far-reaching and profound ambitions of this venture: “The key to the project is trying to get away from the traditional. We are never going to see people walking down the street in full latex but a suit with latex incorporated, now that could work.”
Picture courtesy of Marcelo Soto Montes, with thanks.
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