Bondage seems to be the new black. Over the past year or two, I have noticed that rope is creeping into all manner of areas outside of the scene. I suppose once latex had become almost respectable with couture outfits, adoption by various pop stars hoping to be a bit wild and, finally, we had rubber clad girls symbolising the forecast on Powergen sponsored TV weather reports. Japanese style and shibari provided something edgy and beautiful, that could always be passed off as art and given a veneer of respectability, yet still shock the vanillas, which is always good for publicity.
Over the past year, I have received a lot of very interesting commissions and been involved in collaborations with exalted names that I would never have dreamed of working with a few years ago. Who would have thought I’d be working with top fashion photographers, Vogue models and internationally acclaimed artists or appearing on national TV? Anyway, enough of me. There must be many others who are receiving these sorts of job, so it would be interesting to see what everyone has done. Stories will be published as they come in, your suggestions are welcome. Hopefully, this will both stimulate additional projects and create a wider understanding of what we are doing within the general public by creating a counter-balance to salacious tabloid newspaper depictions of BDSM and stories of non-consensual criminal acts being associated with kink. Why to they insist in associating the non-consensual with the consensual? It makes no more sense than branding everyone who is sexually active as a rapist or paedophile. It’s not those who can express their kink consensually that is the problem, it’s those that can’t and thus build up steam until they feel they must take what they want regardless of consent that you need to watch out for.
What Lies Beneath by Mert & Marcus from LOVE
As you might recall, I did a shoot the What Lies Beneath shoot with Mert and Marcus last year with a raft of top models. One of those involved was the face of Kalvin Klein, Lara Stone. Sadly, Ms Stone did not fall prey to my ropes and I had to content myself with chatting and scrounging her cigarettes. You can imagine how gutted I was to discover somebody else had already popped her bondage cherry. If you know who the rigger was please let me know so I can kill…erh, credit him 🙂 Here are the photos from the shoot in Visionaire Issue 60.
Bob Ropemarks has a list of media appearances to his name longer than his arm. Being the delightful pervert that he is, many of the more mainstream ones seem to be explaining what shibari is all about to the public, although I’m only guessing as I don’t speak a word of Dutch. Here’s a still from one of the videos where he has lured some poor unsuspecting TV presenter into a dungeon to be shown the ropes, although she doesn’t seem to mind too much.
It seems that what counts as ‘mainstream’ in the Netherlands is somewhat different from UK and US TV definitions as his most recent appearance was on the charmingly named ‘Spuiten_en_Slikken‘ show, which I believe translates something like ‘Shoot and Swallow’ and not in the horticultural and ornithological sense. Whilst British TV is getting a little more permissive, on US TV you certainly can’t show a ‘tit’, let alone any ‘shooting’ or ‘swallowing’. There all ‘money shots’ usually feature the face of a president but we are talking green-backs, not bukkake.
