Before Fetish Culture: Desire, Fashion, and the Birth of Modern Fetishism, 1870–1910
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Before leather bars, latex clothing, fetish magazines, BDSM clubs, pin-up photography, underground dungeons, or the visual vocabulary that would define twentieth-century fetish culture, there were objects.
Boots, corsets, gloves, fur, uniforms, stockings, restraints, shoes, masks, fabrics, and carefully constructed silhouettes already carried meanings that extended far beyond their practical functions. Literature transformed them into symbols, fashion used them to reorganize the body, photography made them reproducible, while the emerging sciences of sexuality attempted to explain why particular objects, materials, gestures, or scenarios could acquire such extraordinary psychological intensity.
Between the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, something fundamental changed. Desire increasingly became something that could be described, categorized, photographed, collected, diagnosed, and discussed through a new vocabulary of sexual psychology. The modern concept of fetishism emerged from this collision between medicine and imagination, but the culture that would eventually grow around it was already developing elsewhere—in novels, theatres, wardrobes, photographic studios, department stores, private collections, and the rapidly expanding cities of industrial Europe.
This was not yet fetish culture as we understand it today. There were no internationally connected communities organized around latex, leather, BDSM identities, puppy play, or specialized nightlife. What existed instead was a fragmented constellation of objects, fantasies, fashions, and theories that would gradually be assembled into the modern fetish imagination. The history of twentieth-century fetish culture begins here.
Before Sexual Fetishism, There Was the Fetish Object
The word fetish existed long before psychologists applied it to sexuality. Its European genealogy developed through colonial encounters, particularly Portuguese and later French descriptions of West African religious objects that Europeans interpreted as possessing supernatural power. The concept was subsequently absorbed into European anthropology and philosophy, where the fetish became an object believed to contain significance beyond its ordinary material existence.
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By the nineteenth century, this idea offered psychologists an unusually powerful metaphor for certain forms of attraction. If an apparently ordinary object could acquire extraordinary symbolic power within religion, perhaps clothing, materials, body parts, or other objects could acquire similarly disproportionate significance within desire.
The analogy was deeply shaped by colonial assumptions and should not be mistaken for a neutral scientific discovery. Yet it created the linguistic bridge through which the modern sexual meaning of fetishism developed. What changed during the late nineteenth century was therefore not the existence of unusual attractions—human desire obviously preceded medical terminology—but the emergence of a system that attempted to classify those attractions as recognizable psychological categories.
1887: Alfred Binet and the Naming of Sexual Fetishism
One of the decisive moments arrived in Paris in 1887, when French psychologist Alfred Binet published Le Fétichisme dans l'amour. Binet used the concept of fetishism to describe situations in which sexual attraction became intensely associated with particular objects, materials, body parts, or sensory characteristics.
The implications were enormous. Desire could now be discussed not simply according to whom someone desired but according to what element of another person—or what object associated with them—became psychologically charged. Shoes, fabrics, hair, hands, clothing, smells, and other details could therefore be examined as independent components of attraction.
From a contemporary perspective, the medical framework surrounding these ideas often appears restrictive and pathologizing. Nevertheless, the terminology created during this period would profoundly influence psychiatry, psychoanalysis, popular culture, and eventually the identities adopted by fetish communities themselves.
The paradox is fundamental to fetish history: much of the vocabulary later used for self-expression originated within institutions attempting to diagnose and categorize human sexuality.
Krafft-Ebing and the Classification of Desire
One year before Binet's essay, Austrian-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing had published the first edition of Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886. Through successive expanded editions, the book became one of the most influential attempts to classify sexual behaviour in the nineteenth century.
Krafft-Ebing organized case histories around desires that contemporary medicine considered deviations from reproductive heterosexuality, contributing to a taxonomy that included concepts such as sadism and masochism. The terminology was medical, but the material frequently came from personal narratives, letters, literature, legal records, and accounts supplied by patients themselves.
This produced an unusual cultural feedback loop. Medicine read literature as evidence; individuals read medical classifications and recognized aspects of themselves; doctors incorporated those accounts into later editions; and categories that had begun as diagnoses gradually became part of the language through which people described identity and desire. Modern fetish terminology was being constructed through an unstable conversation between doctors and the people they attempted to classify.
Venus in Furs and the Literature of Submission
Long before the term masochism became widely recognized, literature had already given symbolic form to many of the desires medicine would later attempt to name.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 novella Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs) became particularly important. Its relationship between Severin and Wanda explores submission, authority, humiliation, fantasy, ritual, clothing, and the symbolic power of fur within an intensely psychological relationship.
When Krafft-Ebing later coined masochism using Sacher-Masoch's name, literature effectively became medical terminology. Readers of Venus in Furs subsequently appeared within sexological case histories themselves, sometimes describing the novel as a text through which they recognized their own desires. The movement between fiction, identity, and medical classification was therefore remarkably direct.
The importance of Venus in Furs to fetish history extends beyond the origin of a word. The novella demonstrates something that would become fundamental to twentieth-century fetish culture: objects can organize fantasy.
Fur is not merely clothing within the narrative. It becomes atmosphere, character, symbol, and psychological trigger, demonstrating how material surfaces can accumulate associations with authority, femininity, distance, sensuality, and transformation.
Long before latex became iconic, fetish already had a material language.
Corsetry and the Architecture of the Body
If literature demonstrated how objects could acquire symbolic power, nineteenth-century fashion demonstrated how objects could physically reorganize the body.
The corset is perhaps the clearest example. By the late Victorian period, corsetry had become entangled with debates surrounding beauty, health, discipline, femininity, morality, modernity, and bodily control. Although popular histories often exaggerate the prevalence of extreme tightlacing, the corset unquestionably occupied an unusually charged position within nineteenth-century visual culture.
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Its significance for later fetish aesthetics lies in its ability to operate simultaneously as clothing and structure. Unlike fabric that simply follows the body, the corset intervenes in silhouette, posture, movement, and bodily awareness. The wearer does not merely put it on; the garment participates in constructing the body's visible form.
Around 1900, Edwardian corsetry introduced the distinctive straight-front or S-bend silhouette, shifting the fashionable body away from the Victorian hourglass toward a posture emphasizing a forward chest and curved lower body.
This relationship between material and transformation would become fundamental to fetish fashion throughout the twentieth century. Latex, rubber, high heels, restrictive boots, masks, uniforms, bondage garments, and later body-modifying fashions all share an underlying principle already visible in corsetry: clothing can do more than decorate identity; it can physically construct it.
Boots, Shoes and the Erotic Detail
Footwear acquired similarly complex symbolic meanings during the nineteenth century. Industrial manufacturing expanded the availability and variety of shoes and boots, while fashion increasingly differentiated footwear according to gender, class, occupation, occasion, and social identity.
A boot could communicate military authority, labour, equestrian culture, respectability, danger, femininity, or masculinity depending upon its design and context. The shoe existed at the intersection of body and object, simultaneously worn and separate, intimate yet publicly visible.
For early psychologists interested in fetishism, footwear became one of the recurring examples through which attraction to objects could be discussed. For visual culture, however, its significance was considerably broader. Boots and shoes altered height, posture, gait, silhouette, and the sound of movement, giving footwear a performative quality that later fetish fashion would amplify dramatically.
The nineteenth-century fascination with footwear therefore anticipated a recurring principle of modern fetish culture: objects become powerful not simply because of their material construction but because of the behaviours, identities, and fantasies they accumulate around them.
Gloves, Stockings, Fur and the Sensory Body
The emerging language of fetishism was never purely visual. Texture, smell, pressure, sound, temperature, and movement all contributed to the psychological significance of materials.
Gloves separated skin from touch while simultaneously emphasizing the shape of the hand. Stockings transformed the appearance and texture of the leg. Fur combined softness, warmth, animality, luxury, and social status. Silk and satin introduced smoothness, reflection, and movement, while leather carried associations with animals, durability, work, riding, military equipment, and protection.
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These materials demonstrate that fetish attraction developed within a larger sensory culture. Industrialization was producing unprecedented quantities of manufactured surfaces, while department stores and modern advertising increasingly organized commodities according to visual and tactile desire.
The modern city was becoming a landscape of things designed to be looked at, touched, purchased, worn, collected, and imagined. Fetishism emerged at precisely this historical moment.
The Department Store and the New World of Objects
The late nineteenth century transformed the relationship between people and commodities. Department stores in Paris, London, Berlin, and other rapidly expanding cities created enormous interiors dedicated to displaying clothing, accessories, perfumes, fabrics, furniture, and luxury goods.
Objects were no longer simply purchased because they were necessary. They were staged. Glass vitrines, mannequins, mirrors, electric lighting, advertising, catalogues, and carefully designed interiors turned shopping into a visual experience in which desire could circulate around commodities themselves.
This development is important to fetish history because the emerging psychological concept of sexual fetishism appeared within the same culture that was becoming increasingly fascinated by commodities. Karl Marx had already used the expression commodity fetishism in an entirely different theoretical context, describing how commodities appear to acquire social power independent of the labour that produced them.
Sexology and political economy were therefore borrowing the same older concept of the fetish to describe two distinctly modern phenomena: the extraordinary meanings attached to objects. Modernity was becoming obsessed with things.
Photography Makes Desire Reproducible
Photography introduced another fundamental transformation. Before photography, erotic images circulated through painting, drawing, engraving, literature, and printed illustration.
The camera created a different relationship between image and reality because photographs appeared to preserve actual bodies, clothing, gestures, and environments with unprecedented immediacy.
By the late nineteenth century, advances in photographic reproduction and printing allowed images to circulate more widely through postcards, private collections, books, catalogues, and clandestine networks. Clothing and objects could now be photographed with extraordinary specificity: the shine of a boot, the construction of a corset, the texture of stockings, the gesture of a gloved hand.
This ability to isolate and reproduce visual details would become essential to fetish culture. The twentieth-century fetish photograph, the pin-up, the bondage catalogue, the leather magazine and eventually the digital fetish archive all depend upon a transformation that occurred much earlier: photography allowed desire to detach itself from the original encounter and travel as an image.
Paris, London, Vienna and the Erotic Metropolis
The emergence of modern fetishism was also an urban phenomenon.
Paris provided the worlds of fashion, cabaret, prostitution, photography, psychiatry, consumer culture, and avant-garde experimentation that made the city particularly important to the history of sexuality. Vienna became central to psychiatry and psychoanalysis. London combined Victorian moral regulation with an enormous underground economy of erotic literature, theatre, prostitution, private clubs, and clandestine imagery.
The contradiction was characteristic of modern metropolitan life. Cities imposed elaborate systems of respectability while simultaneously creating the anonymity necessary for people to escape them.
Railways, hotels, arcades, theatres, department stores, cafés, photographic studios, public parks, and rapidly expanding nightlife produced new environments where strangers encountered one another with unprecedented frequency.
Modern sexuality was being shaped not simply by changing ideas but by changing architecture.
The city created new possibilities for anonymity, observation, performance, secrecy, and transformation—conditions that would later become fundamental to queer nightlife and fetish spaces.
1905: Freud and the Expansion of Sexual Psychology
By the beginning of the twentieth century, sexuality had become an increasingly important subject of European psychology.
In 1905, Sigmund Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, placing sexuality at the centre of his developing psychoanalytic theory. The first edition challenged conventional assumptions that sexuality could be understood simply as an adult reproductive instinct and instead presented it as considerably more complex, variable, and psychologically constructed.
Freud's later writing would address fetishism more directly, but the importance of the 1905 essays lies in the broader intellectual transformation they represented. Sexual desire was increasingly being understood as something with a history within the individual, shaped by memory, development, fantasy, substitution, and unconscious association. The object of desire was no longer necessarily self-explanatory. It had become something to interpret.
Berlin Before Weimar: Sexuality Becomes Political
Berlin would become central to fetish and queer visual culture during the 1920s, but the intellectual infrastructure that made Weimar sexual modernity possible began considerably earlier.
In 1897, physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld co-founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin, an organization dedicated particularly to campaigning against Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing sexual relations between men. Hirschfeld's work belonged to a larger transformation in which sexuality became not merely a medical question but a subject of political organization, research, identity, and civil rights.
His later Institute for Sexual Science would not open until 1919, placing it beyond the chronological limits of this chapter, but the foundations of Berlin's extraordinary twentieth-century sexual culture were already being constructed before the First World War. The city that would later become synonymous with cabaret, androgyny, queer nightlife, sexual experimentation, and avant-garde culture did not suddenly awaken in the 1920s. Its intellectual and political networks had been developing for decades.
1910: Identity Becomes Something That Can Be Studied
By 1910, another major conceptual shift was underway.
That year Hirschfeld published Die Transvestiten, an important early study of people who wore clothing culturally associated with another gender. Although its terminology belongs to a very different historical context from contemporary understandings of transgender and gender-diverse identities, the work demonstrates how clothing, identity, embodiment, and sexuality had become subjects of systematic sexological investigation.
This matters enormously to the history that follows. The twentieth century would repeatedly return to clothing as a technology of identity. Uniforms, corsets, leather, latex, masks, hoods, high heels, sportswear, drag, military clothing and countless other forms of dress would allow individuals to alter how their bodies were perceived and how they experienced themselves.
By 1910, European sexual science was beginning to recognize that clothing could be psychologically significant in ways that exceeded fashion.
The Fetish Before Fetish Culture
Looking back from the twenty-first century, it is tempting to project contemporary fetish identities onto the nineteenth century, imagining fully formed BDSM, leather, rubber, or fetish communities waiting to be discovered beneath Victorian respectability. History is considerably more interesting than that.
The modern categories did not yet exist in their contemporary forms.
Instead, the period produced the ingredients from which those cultures would later be constructed.
Literature demonstrated that submission, authority, clothing, and materials could organize elaborate psychological fantasies. Sexology created terminology for previously unnamed attractions. Fashion demonstrated that garments could transform the body. Industrialization multiplied the objects and surfaces available for desire. Photography made bodies and objects reproducible. Department stores turned commodities into spectacles, while expanding cities created spaces for anonymity, experimentation, and alternative identities.
Fetish was becoming simultaneously a word, an image, an object, a psychological category, and a way of interpreting desire. What it did not yet possess was a public culture of its own. That would come next.
From Diagnosis to Visual Culture
The transformation that followed during the twentieth century would be extraordinary. Categories created inside psychiatric books would gradually escape the clinic. Objects discussed as symptoms would become consciously adopted symbols. Private fantasies would acquire photographic languages, magazines, designers, shops, clubs, organizations, architecture, and eventually international communities.
The corset would migrate from everyday fashion into fetish iconography. Leather would move from workwear, military equipment, and motorcycle clothing into queer identity. Rubber would travel from industrial technology toward specialized fashion. Masks would move between theatre, ritual, anonymity, fashion, and BDSM. Photography would transform private fascination into reproducible visual culture.
By the 1920s, particularly in cities such as Berlin and Paris, many of these strands would begin intersecting with cabaret, surrealism, queer nightlife, and the avant-garde.
The history of modern fetish culture was about to become visible.
But before fetish could become a culture, modern society first had to invent the intellectual and visual machinery through which desire itself could be classified, materialized, photographed, and recognized. The period between 1870 and 1910 created that machinery.
Related Concepts in the Atomique Fetish Archive
Stocking Fetish
Glove Fetish
Fur Fetish
Fetish Photography
Written by Otávio Santiago
Founder of Atomique Fetish, an editorial platform exploring fetish design, culture & visual research.
Visual research continues at @atomique.fetish ↗
