MILLA-TARY: Model Milla Vie shows how latex fashion by Bondinage can help a girl make a point (photo: Phoebus)
Bondinage: how German fairs boost UK latex fashion brand.
This Easter, with its website relaunched, Bondinage will again be one of very few British latex fashion labels showing and selling at Germany’s Fetish Evolution Weekend. Designer Stephen Fuller tells Tony Mitchell why European events work so well for his business
Later this month, as Easter arrives, Stephen Fuller will once again be in the German city of Essen, unpacking boxes of Bondinage latex fashion clothing for his expo stand and catwalk show at this year’s Fetish Evolution weekend.
Fuller has been a colourful contributor to the overall Fetish Evolution experience for many years now, as well as exhibiting at each German Fetish Fair since that event began in Berlin, and at various other adult/fetish expos such as BoundCon and the Venus Fair.
This makes him almost unique among British latex labels, which for the most part seem unable or unwilling to establish a presence at these big annual European events.
The fact that Stephen does make the effort (along with a tiny group of other British exhibition regulars such as Latex 101) is undoubtedly one of the reasons Bondinage has such a big customer base in Europe.
Of no small importance, too, is that ‘Bondinage style’ is particularly attractive to many of the discerning female power-dressers who are into latex fashion and attend the big European gatherings.
One might even say that professional dominas — and other women who like to rock the domme look in private, in pictures or at parties — are the label’s natural clientèle.
Stephen Fuller started Bondinage in London in 2003, although by then he had already been working with latex as a fashion fabric for more than a decade.
A graduate of St Martins (now Central St Martins) College of Art and Design, he began experimenting with rubber in 1992 after returning from stints in the Milan and Madrid fashion industries to set up his own Stephen Fuller label.
His early efforts led to work with various celebrity clients. For example he created an entire tour wardrobe for Kylie Minogue, and made dresses that were modelled by Naomi Campbell and Mandy Smith (originally notorious as Rolling Stone Bill Wyman’s underage girlfriend) for a Polaroid celebrity calendar photographed by Bob Carlos Clarke.
“When I first started working with latex,” Stephen recalls, “the fetish design/manufacturing scene appeared to have the same ethos as the punk scene earlier in the UK.”
That ethos, he says, was that “If you had an idea and inclination, then you too could have your work exhibited and bought by willing models and clients”. (But, he adds as an aside, as we have seen with latex fashion, the punk scene produced “some extremely good and also bad” work.)
“I thought that with my fashion and tailoring background,” he continues, “my work would stand out as being unique (in a good way), stylish and well constructed.
April 2014 cover: Alexandra Potter by Raymond K Larum
“I wanted to introduce colour as there were a lot of interesting colours to utilise but many designers at the time were using a safe colour palette.
“With mainstream fashion, the colours change seasonally (bi-annually). In the latex fashion design scene, the transition seemed slow, with not much creativity. I had pioneered printing onto latex in 1993-94, and this was then developed into the Bondinage range.”
‘The first German Fetish Ball was great and opened up another world that would not have presented itself unless we’d gone out to look for it’
In 2004, the year after he launched Bondinage, Fuller booked stand space at the very first German Fetish Fair — part of the new German Fetish Ball Weekend in Berlin organised by castle fetish party specialists Xklusiv Events.
Given how many German events he has shown at since then, it must be safe to say these trips have been a sound investment for Stephen’s business. After all, I observe, no one would just throw good money after bad by continuing at fairs that didn’t pay. The designer laughs in agreement.
“No, we’re not just throwing good money after bad — the international fairs do work for us. The first German Fetish Ball Weekend in 2004 was great and opened up another world that would not have presented itself unless we’d gone out to look for it.
READ MOREApril 2014 cover and this article’s banner image: Alexandra Potter by Raymond K Larum
Köln-based photographer/advertising creative director Raymond Kerrin Larum’s picture of Ballet Heels queen Alexandra Potter (above right and banner) in Bondinage’s new Vertigo catsuit and corset may not seem the obvious cover image to represent a latex fashion label known for its strong use of colours and affinity for uniforms and other sharply-tailored power-dressing.
But that’s a great part of this picture’s appeal: Alexandra — fresh-faced, gamine, trim of figure and tiny of waist — shows us a simpler side of Bondinage that is not so often seen.
That said, the general look will not be unfamiliar to the legions of fans who follow her regular adventures on tiptoes through her website Ballet-Heels.com — or to anyone who caught her in similar garb walking around the 2011 Fetish Evolution expo at the Hotel Bredeney.
Raymond Kerrin Larum separates his mainstream and fetish activities to quite an extent, and this presents a potentially bewildering array of different URLs for any fan or potential fan to check out.
He begun working as a professional photographer/retoucher in 2004, after learning to photograph people and fashion while starting training as a professional model coach and runway trainer in New York.
He added cinematography to his skill-set in 2010 — the same year he also launched LateXperiment.com, the website that, as the name suggests, showcases his experiments with latex photography.
For this site he applies his fashion skills to fetish, not only producing highly polished ‘pure’ latex images but also combining latex with woven fabrics (such as fabric tops over latex leggings), shot outside in daylight to create deliciously subversive ‘street fashion’ looks that he tags Highstyle.
Larum is also Alexandra Potter’s webmaster and collaborator on the Ballet-Heels.com site dedicated to her modelling. They met and first shot together in 2009 through a shared interest in mixing fashion and ballet; it also gave the ex-dancer her first experience of latex clothing.
The next time they met to shoot, She tried on the ballet boots that were in Raymond’s studio, and remembers that it was “fun even though the boots were a size too small”.
As she liked the Highstyle concept, she was soon slipping into a pair of latex tights with the boots, and walking outside to shoot some of her first ballet heel photos. She says:
“Because I could walk so well with the ballet heels, Raymond offered me the idea of a website with me as single model. I thought about it for few days and accepted — the best decision in my model career so far.”
The first full shoot for the Ballet Heels site took place in March 2010. And the rest, as they say, is history.
www.rklarum.com
facebook.com/PotterAlexandra
Note: Links to LatexExperiment.com and Ballet-Heels.com in the original version of this article have been removed as these sites are no longer active
As well as its website (about to be relaunched at time of writing), Bondinage has a showroom that customers may visit by appointment.
The address is Studio J, Clarendon Buildings, Horsfell Road, London N5 1XL and appointments can be made by phoning/faxing +44(0)20 3620 6497 or by e-mailing mail@bondinage.com.
Page-header image: Phoebus Photos
Tags: Clothing, Latex, Models
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