Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power

The word fetishism evokes images of `kinky' sex, involving an abnormal attraction to certain articles of clothing, such as black leather boots, or body parts, like legs and buttocks. Yet the fetish is in fashion - on the catwalks and in the streets. Leather gear, body piercing, second-skin rubber, even the corset, are back; no longer restricted to sexual subcultures but worn by `club kids' and socialites alike. While fetishism has traditionally been regarded by pyschologists as a `perversion', modern fashion has increasingly embraced characteristic fetish-items such as the spiked high-heel shoe. Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power is a historically-grounded study of the relationship between fashion and fetishism. Treating fashion as a symbolic system linked to the expression of sexuality, Steele marshals a dazzling array of evidence from pornography, psychology, and historical literature to illuminate this relationship. Is it fashion or fetish when fashion magazines feature the straps and stilettos of the dominatrix? What of body piercing, either ear rings or those worn through genitals? Is the corset, whether worn by men or women a `style' or a `perversion'. Steele brilliantly charts the boundaries of the `normal' and the `perverse', and shows how even the most bizarre-seeming clothing fetishes enable their wearers (male and female, gay and straight) to use clothing to express their social and sexual identities.

An acknowledged authority on the erotic experts of fashion, Valerie Steele is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York.