On latex: aesthetic, substance and history (Part 1)

I wasn't born a fetishist. Or so I tell myself. Is anyone ever really? Or do we all get introduced to fetish by the consumer society or the expansive sexy horizons of the internet?  The moment I first put a latex catsuit on has changed my life forever. Once it's tightly clung to my body, this memory will be with me forever, in anything I wear after. Latex is a cornerstone of the aesthetic associated with kink and fetish – but its cultural history and sensory experience often get overlooked. In my two subsequent essays, I gently stroke the surface of these questions and the endearing material. 

It’s Saturday afternoon, and I find myself zipping up a latex catsuit. The hotel room on the 13th floor is quiet: no traffic, no noise from the street. Everything is soft and still: pearl grey carpet and curtains, pristine white sheets. I stand in front of a round bathroom mirror, enclosed in a ring light. Black latex gleams like a raw oil spill, or a freshly polished sports car. It covers my body completely, up to the middle of my neck. The zip runs down between my breasts, down my stomach, clings tightly to my crotch. I have already soaked my latex in watered-down silicone, leaving an immaculate shine. Before I zip it up tightly, the material moves like wet flower petals, clinging to my skin. It is animated with its own life-like movement, as if the latex is breathing. Underneath, my skin is warm, porous and imperfect. Under the layer of rubber, my sweat is slowly mixing with silicone dressing aid.

A fetish garment is something that transforms how you exist as a body. The moment you put it on, it blends with the person you are to create a new, unknown erotic entity. In the mirror, I recognise my facial features, but not myself. Rubber accentuates my curves, and yet I feel free of any gender. I am present, yet expansive. Electric currents from my encased skin fuse into a slow and ambient continuous high.

By the large hotel bed, my play partner is also in full latex. He waits on his knees, hands cuffed behind his back. The room smells of rubber now, a specific rich scent which is so hard to grasp. He is blindfolded, drifting through the soft, endless inwards. When I unwrap and lay my catsuit out on the bed, he smiles to the familiar sound of unfolding rubber.

What brought us here? Desire, perversion, disposable income, love? Chasing an erotic high? Trying to understand the language of fetishism, which is so new yet so programmed into us culturally and sexually? We own nearly identical catsuits from the same latex manufacturer, which we had both bought before we met. We rented this neutral pearl grey room to put them on and see where they take us. We wanted to have an experience which is both personal and detached. We wanted a temporary escape. We are in a liminal space at the intersection of sexuality, consumption, pop culture and senseless lust. Truth is, the world is on fire, but I’m in a hotel room dressed in a black latex catsuit. Another truth: I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.

Latex is a cornerstone of the aesthetic associated with kink and fetish. Latex is a visual shortcut to saying, this is not just sex, this has potential for something dark and perverse. Shiny, skin-tight garments are also a way of transcending human nature. The Matrix trilogy has put it in the framework of highly stylised millennial futurism. Kanye West performed Donda 2 in a thick square-shaped latex moto jacket by Busted Brand and matching rubber gloves. In the work of British fashion designer Richard Quinn, a latex catsuit becomes a portal to another dimension, a key to transforming into a doll, an animal, a creature.

The amped shine of latex in retouched editorial photographs is endlessly endearing. But something remains lost in translation between fetish culture and this popularised aesthetic. On YouTube, there is a video of Kim Kardashian trying to squeeze into an ochre latex outfit for Paris Fashion Week in 2020. We observe her huffing and puffing while pulling on the thin rubber— and, to the absolute horror of any fetishist, with no talcum powder or dressing aid. For a fetishist, putting on their latex is a completely different process – frustrating at times, but possessing its own ritualistic power.

The origins of latex are ancient and organic. Use of natural rubber dates back to Mesoamerica in 1600 BC, in the Maya, Aztec and Olmec cultures. Latex is a milky fluid that oozes from various rubber plant species after tissue injury. “South America remained the main source of latex until 1876, when Henry Wickham, in an act of botanical piracy, smuggled 70,000 Amazonian rubber tree seeds out of Brazil and into England. These seedlings eventually made their way to more compatible climates in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia, countries that today rank among the largest producers of natural rubber,” wrote Cassidy George outlining the colonial history of the material in her piece for the BBC.

The emergence of rubber fetish is closely linked to the invention of the Mackintosh raincoat in 1824. England’s Mackintosh Society is known as one of the world’s first fetish organisations. The history of latex fashion and fetish is also closely connected to the name of John Sutcliffe, a former aircraft engineer who took on making rubber and leather motorcycle gear in 1957. For three subsequent decades, he 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, featuring illustrations, bondage and rubber-themed erotica and photography, both professional and amateur.

The particularity of AtomAge fetish imagery was perfectly summed up by American BDSM writer Patrick Califia in his essay, “Beyond Leather: Expanding the Realm of Senses to Rubber” first published in 1991. “The English are especially good at rationalising sexual deviation as if it were a logical extension of everyday life,” he wrote. “I saw this tendency personified in an issue of the English fetish magazine AtomAge. It featured a rare photo essay about a ‘happy couple’ dressing up for an outing. Although they were posed so their faces didn’t show, they seemed like a typical, rather pudgy pair of people getting dressed in a middle-class bedroom. It was just what they wore was weird. First, they put on their rubber shorts (or panties), then their rubber undershirt (or bra), then their rubber stockings, rubber trousers, rubber overshirts, rubber hip waders, rubber gloves, rubber raincoats and hats. The last photo was a shot of our “well-protected couple” going fishing in the rain and wading up to their waist in an icy mountain stream – ‘not feeling the weather a bit’. Thus, England’s foggy and damp climate becomes the excuse for jogging about  80 pounds or so of Mr Goodyear’s best”.

Latex fetishism has a considerably different political history to leather, which was first and foremost the abode of LGBTQI+ leatherfolk — a gravitating point for anti-assimilationist, loud and pervy queers, daddies and dykes. A large number of historical rubber lovers are that “pudgy pair” in a middle-class bedroom, practising fetish as a private pleasure, rather than a political riot. The two, however, still go hand in hand. Rubber clothes was among the favourites of the punk scene, which emerged around the SEX Boutique run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, who later incorporated the material into her collections. Later, in the mid-1980s, Sutcliffe was prosecuted for obscenity by the police, and the AtomAge back stock of magazines and printing plates were destroyed. He died shortly after, in 1987.

Stay subscribed for part 2, out next week. 

Images: 

1. Portrait of me in a latex catsuit by Anna Sampson. 

2. Richard Quinn lookbook, Fall-Winter 2021.

3. Outtake from Atomage Magazine.

4. Pamela Rooke aka Jordan in latex, archival photograph.