The 2018 event has dropped the Resurrection part of the name, coined by the new owners of DeMask in 2012 to indicate their intention to revive the ‘traditional fetish party’ style of DeMask’s legendary 1990s bashes.

Instead, this year’s ‘more intimate’ gathering will have much more emphasis on play. There will be performances by selected mistresses and other local people with strong DeMask connections, but no organised shows on the previous scale, and no catwalk show.

These changes have been forced on Europerve VII co-hosts DeMask and Wasteland by the disappointing attendance figures at earlier Resurrection parties. Those typically attracted only two or three hundred guests to venues with capacities in the high hundreds or more.

This is a well-known problem in Amsterdam for anyone trying to organise a fetish party. It is virtually impossible to find a suitable venue in the city with an ideal capacity (for fetish) in the mid-hundreds.

This forces organisers to try to fill something much bigger, as EuroPerve attempted to do for several years, or to downsize, as it has now done, in order to keep the party going without the prospect of big losses.

After last year’s EuroPerve in new venue Q-Factory — with its novel option of taking a room in the hotel occupying the upper floors of the venue building — I ended up with the strong impression that the event might not last another year.

So the fact that it has survived is good news, although this year’s downsizing takes it in the opposite direction I’d hoped to see it follow. But I can’t pretend to be surprised.

Despite its attractions as a tourist destination and its reputation (less deserved these days) as a liberal city, Amsterdam has struggled to re-establish itself as a prime location for fetish gatherings since the early days of the original Europerve events.

The hostility of the city’s authorities towards what they are inclined to categorise as sex parties has made life difficult for fetish promoters.

Ironically, the city is today still associated with what is often described as ‘Europe’s biggest fetish party’: Wasteland. But, like Dominatrix, Wasteland actually takes place well outside the city boundaries.

And, despite Wasteland’s characterisation as a fetish party, a relatively small number of genuine fetish people are to be found among the thousands who attend this event.

This is partly, at least, because the Amsterdam (and indeed Dutch) fetish scene itself is not that big. They’re up to their necks in swingers, but fetishists? Not so much.

The desire to be involved in a ‘proper’ fetish party was reportedly what prompted Wasteland organiser René to decide in 2011 to partner-up with DeMask’s Louva and Anton in resurrecting EuroPerve.