Aberrant Artifacts & Non-Semantic Signification

Enfants Riches Déprimés & Barbarian Leathersex Gear

Near the end of William Carney’s The Rose Exterminator there is a scene where our protagonist, a hesitant participant/affiliate of Southern California leathersex culture, along with another Top Man, end up encountering the well-equipped dungeon of a man whom they both knew who was found dead in the novel’s opening chapter.

While the novel itself is a bit overwritten in a very idiosyncratic style (one that one gets used to fairly quickly if you can find yourself invested in the novel’s events), the chapter successfully paints a spatial portrait of overwhelm, crafting a labyrinthine space dedicated to sadomasochistic practices, but it does so by the articulation of an extremely abject presentation of aberrant artifacts.

The chapter was revelatory to me, in the sense that it manages to reiterate something to me that I think I had figured out much earlier in my life but had given up thinking about for unknown reasons, but it is the idea of certain practices being able to be irrevocably invoked & alluded to via physical materials: like the evidence left of a crime but in reverse. One can think of the vocative presence of unknown surgical instruments in proximity to bodies in the work of Rudolf Schwarzkogler and Gunter Brus: we do not necessarily know the function of the instrument, but the instrument manages to evoke an activity that is simultaneously beyond our understanding, out of vision, and also generative of the frisson of sexual terror.

The same idea is also used regularly in genre cinema: the “instruments for operating on mutant women” of Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, the homicidal apparatuses left at the scenes of homicide in Finger’s Seven, etc etc. Objects that are legible but unknowable are able to point to unimaginable experiences that cannot be shown on screen. We do not have to understand how these artefacts, precisely, are made use of, but there is enough recognizable that our fear and anxiety fills in the blanks.

In terms of any sort of BDSM or leathersex practices, there may or may not be instruments used. Instruments offering routes to paradise or transcendence can communicate both pure dread or the potential for overwhelm depending on the access any given individual in the world has had to transgressive potentialities. The edge that leathersex rides for the uninitiated is always intentionally half in and half out of reality. It’s why there’s so much crossover between early punk iconography and leathersex. There’s an aesthetic bent that moves beyond mere signifier and into the realm of experiential practice.

Considering my obsessions (& the regular topics of this blog), it was, as mentioned, a bit of a revelation to be able to connect the dots within this constellation. It’s a functional elaboration of this network of communication and sovereignty that is related to the body and garments and it was there the whole time. Part of Poell’s elaboration of his system of garments throughout the years has been via a sort of complicity with objects that one cannot quite put their finger on a utility or specific point of reference beyond, perhaps, violence itself.

Finally moving outside the castle, my obsessions as of late have been with the styling & runway looks for Henri Alexander Levy’s Enfants Riches Déprimés (ERD moving forward for the sake of it being a pain in the ass to type diacritical marks on my keyboard) as well as the early to mid 80s turn in Leathersex culture towards more explicitly “costume”-like and blatantly over-the-top harnesses and gear. Both of these elements, on their own, could easily be read as bad LARP if not for how well they work within the context each is presented in. Both carry a sort of stylistic defiance that informs the content: ERD being extremely 21st century in this sense (and I think actually far, far smarter than most are willing to give it credit as, if only due to the intentional–and in my opinion, pointedly performative, attitude of the designer himself), and the over-the-top leathersex gear expression being somewhere between a necessary withdrawal into fantasy while also insisting upon a heightened political visibility in the face of the Reagan administration et al.

Enfants Riches Déprimés and the luxury of transgression

I think there’s actually much more I should take the time to write about ERD, later, but what I want to highlight in this essay is the use of artefacts and hardware in the styling of the outfits that end up successfully taking them in a much more interested direction than most contemporary fashion houses (labels? brands? globalism makes the noun hard to decide I guess?).

From what I can gather there has been occasional use of this “hardware” in the seasonal collections at least since FW19/20, but I want to focus primarily on SS25 and AW25/26 as they are most exciting to me for the reasons I have mentioned above. I would characterize much of Levy’s designs at ERD as being very much “after” the european side of the late-70s and early-80s punk scene, which to me culturally feels more like post-punk, industrial & minimal synth music rather than British or American first wave punk. There is an abundance of leather, studded belts, and intentional destruction, but these are detourned and refined into something much more specific.

My absolute favorite hardware detail comes by way of a look from AW25, where a larger leather corset belt, which already features a closure that is an ornamented steel hook, fills the remaining “belt loop” holes with two additional metal artifacts. The resemble surgical tools: long, pointed sharp ends (one seems to be a hook, while the other is more of a peak), bearing ornate handles that one can see serve for grip as well as aesthetics. What are they used for? Are they weapons? Is this mean, wearing a full leather outfit, including leather fencing shirt, going to be performing surgical interventions? The specific use remains beyond us, but they are evocative as fuck, not just pointing to some general reference, but they seem to insist upon an action one performs upon something, or someone, else.

My favorite look from SS25 is a direct quotation of leathersex gear, but within the system of the entire outfit, points directly to the ambience of The Story of O’s Roissy: a woman wearing a leather skirt, a large parallelipiped leather corset belt and a draped-open silk shirt has her arms bound up to a metal bar that is supported behind her back, her wrists attached to the bar by relatively typical wrist cuffs found widely among bondage afficionados. On her neck she wears a collar that does not seem to echo the attachment style of the write cuffs, but rather looks like a leather belt matching the style found elsewhere in the season on the waists of models. It’s a smart choice because it takes a step away from pure bondage aesthetics and forces a closer consideration of the signs that we see. The bondage to the bar itself becomes performative in a way where the referent is lost: is this political protest or sexual play? Can it be both?

As mentioned, there are many examples of this throughout the work, but these two specifically I find extremely evocative. I have made the comment to a number of people that unlike the work of other designers, I don’t necessarily have any urge to “own” ERD pieces as much as I want to allow myself to learn from how this “accessorizing” operates within the way dress and performance communicate.

Barbarian leathersex: post-apocalyptic fantasy as voiced political scream

The development and history of leather accoutrements and the way one can trace evidence of leathersex fashion throughout even just the initial run of Drummer magazine would be a fascinating project that I would, personally, be thrilled to encounter. While I have always been fascinated by the stylings of leather culture, lately the performativity and explicit fantasy elements that one can find evidence of in the early to mid-80s have been particularly inspiring to me.

At a material level, the fact that by this point leather gear had become a specific market that many were trying to tap into certain accounts for the abundance of new designs making their way into the world (for money loves anything new), and the fact that the early-80s also introduced a sub-genre of Barbarian fantasy movies featuring overly muscular, leatherclad men in post-apocalyptic situations certainly fed the fantasies of gay male leather culture, I think there’s something else relevant to these developments.

The open access to steroids introduced bodies that became bigger and more overwhelming, which inherently offered more landscape to decorate: the field of the body could present new options. Global trade made materials more accessible. More people were tuned in to leathersex. But then, also, came AIDs, and an increasingly repressive and conservative political administration that wanted to preach heteronormative values at the expense of virtually everything (and everyone) else. Most men, at this point, were very much out of the closet, and had no desire to go back in. As such, visibility became a very potent form of protest. Leathersex and more niche kink elements of “aberrant” sexuality were even more under fire than what the log-cabin gays wanted to insist was just another normative sexuality. The violence of transgression suddenly became something life or death.

So, sure, capitalism was there to make costumes more accessible, but the more outlandish your leather gear became, the more loud you were screaming. To me this is important, and manages to give personal expressivity a public bent that makes it more relevant to the culture at large. With the current onslaught of whatever specifically it is that’s happening in this particular moment, I can’t help but be inspired by this idea, and what it has to offer.

Between these two ideas I push forward: working on how my own body and my own garments can express something both transcendent, transgressive, and sovereign. By looking and thinking through these visual ideas that inspire me, I feel like new doors are presenting themselves to the world at large.