Yaz: Abduction – film features Yaz in a Last Supper/Hades setting, with three ‘hell hounds’ at the other end of the chains. She wears a Dark Garden Grable Bodysuit Corset in black patent leather
Yaz: Abduction film fetish fashion tells a true tale of incarceration
APRIL COVER STORY: Yaz (Yazmeen Mirgoli) is a director, producer, and multi-disciplinary performance and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her just-released second album, Persephone, includes the single, Abduction, now followed by a self-directed and produced short film of the same title. For the film, Yaz channels the mythology of Greek goddess Persephone along with fetish/BDSM imagery to tell the true story of her incarceration in a psychiatric hospital at the age of 15. Here, she tells Tony Mitchell how her earlier life has influenced all her work up to and including Abduction, and talks about the new and vintage corsets from San Francisco’s Dark Garden that she wears in the film. Banner: Yaz as Persephone in Alexandra Corset from Dark Garden’s Invocation couture collection
Los Angeles-based director, producer and multi-disciplinary artist/musician Yazmeen Mirgoli, aka Yaz, has just released Abduction, a short film following close on the heels of the eponymous single taken from her second album of electronic music, Persephone.
Inspired by true events — Yaz’s real-life experience at age 15 of being unlawfully institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital by her mother — the five-minute film short sensibly comes with a trigger warning that its content may be disturbing to some viewers.
So why is this film — which Yaz directs and stars in — considered appropriate subject matter for a Fetishistas article? The answer is in the way Yaz employs fetish and BDSM imagery, including bondage and tightlacing corsetry, to tell her story.
Watch Abduction yourself within this article and it will soon become evident why Yaz has ended up characterising the piece as “a full-on fetish fashion film”, and why Britain’s Latex Fashion TV boss Cole Black has praised it as “really well-produced and shot”.
To be clear, the darker elements of Abduction are not presented as erotic, but rather as metaphors using a visual language Yaz is familiar with — a way to represent, in a relatable way, the sense of restriction and powerlessness she felt during much of her earlier life.
It’s also not just chance that her new album, released last month, is titled Persephone. Yaz sees in her experience a parallel with the story from the Greek myths of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter and goddess of spring who was kidnapped by Hades and later became the Queen of the Underworld.
Abduction the film thus became, for Yaz, “a re-imagining of the myth of Persephone through the lens of bondage and BDSM”.
The film sees Yaz playing a version of herself as the young woman who becomes entangled in a world of power dynamics and control, mirroring Persephone’s descent into the underworld.
For good measure, the film’s Greek myth elements are also complemented by imagery inspired by Da Vinci’s famous painting of the Last Supper (or one of its many derivations) — another of Yaz’s classical reference points for betrayal, punishment, death and resurrection.
As the narrative of Abduction unfolds, viewers are drawn into a surreal landscape where myth and reality converge, culminating in a powerful exploration of sacrifice, resurrection, and the eternal cycle of life and death. Yaz aka Persephone is finally seen to emerge from — and overcome — her ordeal in her new guise as a strong and dominant woman.
The film contrasts scenes where she is Persephone the maiden — symbolically clutching a bright red pomegranate while diaphanously-clad girls dance around her — with Yaz the prisoner, incarcerated in a stark and scary institution surrounded by faceless staff who gag her and bind her in a straitjacket.
In real life, she recalls, “I was strapped down to a bed, drugged, and held hostage for nine days as the 72-hour psychiatric hold I was initially placed under continued to be illegally renewed.
“I was stripped of any semblance of autonomy and all of my rights, and was forced into a position of complete submission with threats of being drugged further and held longer for any sort of perceived lack of total compliance.
“After nine days in hell, I was released and swore I would spend the rest of my life fighting to change the system that nearly killed me. I have spent the past 12 years unravelling the impact of what happened to me over those nine life-altering days.
“The creation of this film has been a very alchemical process for me. Over the last 11 months, I’ve gone through a very transformative ‘dark night of the soul’ and Abduction is the culmination of that journey and the process of individuation that I have been going through as a result.
“For a long time,” she explains, “I hid behind the armour of ‘Yaz’. At a very young age, I created this hyper-feminine fantasy figure that was braver, stronger, and more powerful than I was as Yazmeen Mirgoli, to protect me from the world because of the abuse I experienced as a child.
“I created this impenetrable armour and untouchable facade to hide my sensitivity and vulnerability so I would not be hurt as I had been during my entire childhood.
“I tried to leave behind Yazmeen Mirgoli because I thought that if I could do that, I would leave behind all of the pain, trauma, and abuse that I had endured. Which doesn’t work — there’s no escaping yourself and trying to do so just makes things that much more challenging.
“But I have existed in that space for over a decade now, and it wasn’t until I created this film that I was finally able to return to myself and be a unified whole again.
“It’s interesting: before we shot the film, I went back and forth on which ‘me’ I was killing ⇒
⇒ off — whether it was Yaz or Yazmeen — and the conclusion that I ultimately came to was that I was killing off the artifice.
“The true victim is the version of me that is inauthentic, because in the artifice I was robbing myself of having real human connection and a fulfilling life.
“The burning away of the ‘victim Yaz’ in the film is symbolic of the deconstruction of the artifice, and that has liberated me and helped me to step into my real power.”
Disturbing hospital restraint scenes aside, Abduction does also feature various less coercive, more decorative types of BDSM and fetish imagery. For example, the film features a ‘first-of-its-kind’ rope bondage suspension by internationally acclaimed rope rigger Damon Pierce.
And many viewers will probably consider the selection of fabulous corsets Yaz wears in Abduction, all created by Autumn Adamme of San Francisco’s legendary Dark Garden Corsetry label, to be worthy of at least equal billing!
So of course it would be interesting to find out more about just how bondage, restrictive practices like tightlacing, and the domme personality Yaz morphs into in Abduction representing her post-trauma ‘rebirth’ all fit into the lady’s real-life story.
“There’s definitely a cause-and-effect relationship in my case,” she says. “From a young age I always gravitated towards the image of the dominatrix.
“While I did not explicitly know what that was at the time, I remember looking at photos and art of women that had that look, and wanting to be them, because I felt that they had power and I didn’t have any semblance of power or autonomy in the environment I grew up in.
“I used to obsessively look at photos of Bettie Page and cartoons from artists like John Willie, Eric Stanton, and Gene Bilbrew and dream about having the power that the women I saw there had, because I felt so powerless.
“In addition to that,” she continues, “I am also dominant as a person and always have been. My grandmother says that I was dominant from the moment I came out of the womb. And I believe that, because I think I would have turned out very differently if I were submissive.
“For me, being a dominant woman is who I am — it’s not an act. However, I think it manifests in ways that are not as subversive as people might think. For example, you can be dominant and be gentle and nurturing, which is infinitely more in line with my disposition than the alternative.
“Dominance has nothing to do with force or manipulation; it’s consensual. There is a pattern I have observed, particularly among submissive men, of mistaking abuse and coercive control as dominance in interpersonal relationships, especially when the perpetrator is a woman.
“This type of misrepresentation is often depicted in popular media, and I think that it is incredibly harmful and dangerous, and is something that desperately needs to be addressed.”
It’s not hard to imagine, then, that Yaz might take issue with the way fetish style — latex clothing for example — has been appropriated as mainstream celebrity fashion.
“There are a lot of people that wear fetish clothing because it’s edgy and garners attention without understanding the protocol or lineage of the garments that they are wearing,” she thinks.
“A great example of that is a ‘dominant’ wearing a collar or someone wearing a corset that is clearly the wrong size, that then goes and spreads misinformation about corseting being unsafe.
“I also find it hypocritical that an artist on a major music label can wear fetish garments or depict elements of BDSM in their work without scrutiny, but when I do that, I am shadow-banned across platforms.
“This despite the fact that my work doesn’t violate any code of conduct and is way less extreme than a lot of the other things that I see from artists who are backed by a major label.
“This is an issue that a lot of independent artists have, as well as members of the fetish community that are just trying to express their interests.”
Despite all of that, she adds, she doesn’t intrinsically have an issue with people wearing fetish garments without being fetishists.
“Because I think that it makes fetish more acceptable, and therefore less isolating or ostracising for those who are exploring their interests.
“However, I think that fetish fashion should be worn in a way that respects the garments and the fetish community, and that real fetishists should not be punished for expressing their interests when those with commercial backing are not punished for the same thing despite it not being authentic.”
READ MORE – GO TO PAGE 2 OF 2BELOW: Two galleries with a total of 24 stills from Yaz’s short film Abduction. Click/tap on either preview image to open its gallery, then click/tap on any thumbnail to start slideshow
SHORT BIO: THE WORLD OF MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARTIST YAZ
Yazmeen Mirgoli aka Yaz is a director, producer, and multi-disciplinary performance and visual artist based in Los Angeles.
Since 2013, her work has been featured globally in film, editorials, print media, advertising, and live events and has amassed over one million views on her YouTube channel Yaz X Music.
On March 29, Yaz released her second album, Persephone. The record features the singles Pomegranates and Abduction and is available to stream and purchase on all digital music platforms globally.
Along with the album, she has released a self-directed and produced visualiser for Pomegranates and a self-directed and produced short film, Abduction, for the record’s second single.
With a global release date of April 12, Abduction will be screened at film festivals domestically and internationally throughout the 2024-2025 film festival season.
For more on the world of Persephone and Yaz’s other work, visit Yaz’s website at theyazcollective.com and connect with her social media at linktr.ee/yazxmusic.
Tags: Bondage, Corsets, Fetish Video, Music, True Stories
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