Fetish in the 20th Century: A Cultural and Visual History of Modern Fetishism
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Modern fetish culture was not invented at a single moment, nor did it emerge exclusively from sexuality. Its visual language was assembled gradually across the twentieth century through fashion, photography, underground publishing, queer nightlife, cinema, art, military clothing, motorcycle culture, performance, industrial design and changing ideas about the body itself.
A corset photographed in the 1920s, a bondage illustration circulating through the mail in the 1940s, a leather jacket worn inside a gay motorcycle club in the 1950s, a rubber garment appearing in an underground magazine, or a body transformed through latex and prosthetics in a 1990s nightclub may appear to belong to separate histories. Seen together, however, they reveal an extraordinary cultural continuum in which objects and materials repeatedly migrated between utility, fashion, sexuality and identity.
The twentieth century transformed fetish from something primarily described through medical and psychiatric terminology into something increasingly represented, photographed, worn, performed, published and eventually organized around communities. By the end of the century, many of its once-secret visual codes had entered fashion, contemporary art, cinema and popular culture. This is not simply a history of BDSM. It is a map of how modern fetish culture learned to look like itself.
The beginning of the twentieth century did not yet possess the consolidated fetish identities recognizable today, but many of their visual ingredients were already circulating through European metropolitan culture. Nowhere was this more visible than in Weimar-era Berlin, where cabarets, queer nightlife, sexual research, cross-dressing culture, prostitution, experimental theatre and avant-garde art existed within an unusually concentrated urban environment.
Weimar Era.
Fashion became particularly important because clothing offered a means of destabilizing conventional gender presentation. Marlene Dietrich's adoption of tailored suits and tuxedos transformed masculine clothing into an instrument of sophisticated feminine self-construction, while performers throughout cabaret culture experimented with uniforms, stockings, corsetry, theatrical makeup and androgynous silhouettes.
Surrealism simultaneously redirected attention toward the erotic potential of objects. Artists including Man Ray fragmented, restrained, masked and transformed the body through photography, suggesting that desire could become attached not only to nudity but to surfaces, objects, gestures and carefully constructed visual situations.
Josephine Baker demonstrated another dimension of this transformation through performance, using costume, choreography and control over spectacle to turn the body into an intentionally constructed public image. The fetish vocabulary of this period therefore existed less as an organized subculture than as an emerging visual field built around androgyny, theatrical transformation, erotic symbolism, clothing and the destabilization of conventional identity.
1940s–1950s — Pin-Up, Bondage Photography and the Underground Fetish Network
By the middle of the century, fetish imagery had developed a considerably more recognizable visual vocabulary, particularly in the United States.
John Willie's Bizarre, published beginning in the 1940s, combined illustration, photography, corsetry, bondage and elaborate fantasies into one of the most influential fetish publications of the period. Its imagery helped establish visual conventions that would survive for generations: restrictive garments, elaborate restraints, exaggerated heels, gloves, masks and carefully choreographed power relationships.
The mail-order business operated by Irving Klaw created another crucial distribution network. Working around the restrictions imposed upon sexual material, Klaw produced and distributed photographs and films featuring bondage, high heels, lingerie and staged scenarios. Bettie Page became the most famous performer associated with this world, demonstrating how the pin-up image could move between mainstream glamour and considerably more specialized fetish imagery.
At approximately the same historical moment, Tom of Finland began developing the hypermasculine drawings that would profoundly influence gay leather culture. His muscular bikers, sailors, policemen and uniformed men transformed masculine archetypes into an erotic universe built around leather, boots, authority and exaggerated physicality.
Fetish culture was still largely underground, but it now possessed something enormously important: a reproducible visual language capable of circulating through magazines, photographs, illustrations and the postal system.
1960s — Sexual Liberation, Art and the Performing Body
The cultural transformations of the 1960s radically expanded the environments in which sexuality could be discussed and represented. Changing attitudes toward censorship, contraception, homosexuality, pornography, gender and artistic experimentation created conditions in which the body increasingly became both political territory and artistic material.
Pierre Molinier's extraordinary photographic self-portraits blurred masculine and feminine presentation through stockings, heels, prosthetic limbs, masks and photomontage, creating bodies that appeared assembled rather than naturally given. His work anticipated later conversations surrounding gender fluidity, fetish fashion and bodily transformation.
Elsewhere, underground cinema, experimental performance and the counterculture brought sexuality into closer contact with contemporary art. Andy Warhol's Factory became emblematic of an environment where glamour, drag, queer identity, celebrity, voyeurism and performance continually overlapped.
The significance of the decade lies less in any single fetish object than in a profound conceptual shift: the body could be consciously redesigned, performed and transformed.
1970s — Leather, Liberation and Fetish as Community
During the 1970s, fetish culture became increasingly connected to organized identity and physical community, particularly within gay leather networks in cities including San Francisco, New York, London, Amsterdam and Berlin.
Leather bars, motorcycle clubs, independent magazines, BDSM organizations and dedicated meeting places created an infrastructure through which people could recognize one another socially rather than simply encounter fetish imagery privately. Clothing became a sophisticated system of communication: leather jackets, caps, harnesses, boots, uniforms and denim could signal affiliation, preference and identity.
The opening of New York's Mineshaft in 1976 became emblematic of this transformation. Architecture, clothing, ritual and community converged within a space specifically associated with gay leather and BDSM culture. Kenneth Anger's earlier and continuing influence through films such as Scorpio Rising demonstrated how motorcycles, leather, uniforms, masculinity, pop culture and homoeroticism could be assembled into an extraordinarily powerful cinematic vocabulary.
At the same time, gay liberation transformed sexuality into an explicitly political question. Visibility, community organization and sexual autonomy became interconnected, allowing fetish identity to move from private fantasy toward collective cultural expression. The 1970s therefore represent a decisive transition from fetish as imagery toward fetish as community.
1980s — Leather, Body Politics and Fetish
By the 1980s, the visual codes developed within underground fetish communities were increasingly visible within contemporary art, nightlife and fashion.
Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs became central to this transformation. His meticulously controlled images of male bodies, leather communities and BDSM subjects brought material previously associated with underground sexual cultures into museums and galleries, generating debates about censorship, obscenity, public funding and the boundaries of art.
Grace Jones developed an entirely different form of fetishized visual power through fashion and performance. Working with designers, photographers and artists including Jean-Paul Goude, she constructed an image combining androgyny, sculptural clothing, leather, uniforms and exaggerated geometry, transforming the body into something simultaneously human, architectural and futuristic.
Later in the decade, Leigh Bowery pushed bodily transformation even further through London's club culture. Masks, extreme makeup, restrictive garments, padding, latex-like surfaces and distorted silhouettes turned nightlife into a laboratory where the body could be continually redesigned.
The AIDS crisis, however, radically altered the communities in which much of this culture had developed. Leather bars, clubs, publications and social networks suffered enormous losses, while activism, safer-sex education and community organization became inseparable from queer cultural life.
The decade therefore cannot be remembered through aesthetics alone. Fetish visibility expanded precisely as many of the communities responsible for creating its visual language confronted extraordinary loss.
1990s — Post-Porn, Club and Digital Culture
The 1990s inherited the visual vocabulary of previous decades and fractured it into countless new directions. Annie Sprinkle's performances and writing challenged distinctions between pornography, education, feminism, performance art and sexual politics, contributing to what became known as post-porn culture. Catherine Opie's photographic portraits documented leather, queer and BDSM communities with a formal seriousness historically reserved for conventional portraiture, transforming intimate subcultural identities into subjects of contemporary photographic history.
Nightlife became another laboratory. New York's Club Kids and related scenes transformed latex, vinyl, platforms, prosthetics, masks, body paint, exaggerated makeup and gender experimentation into spectacular forms of public self-invention. Similar developments occurred through European club culture, where industrial music, techno, cybergoth aesthetics, body modification and fetish fashion increasingly overlapped.
Mainstream popular culture was simultaneously absorbing these languages. Madonna's 1992 Erotica era and Sex book made bondage, leather, voyeurism and queer sexuality visible within global pop culture on an unprecedented scale, while fashion designers increasingly borrowed materials and silhouettes historically associated with fetish communities.
Most importantly, the decade ended at the threshold of another transformation: the internet. What had previously circulated through magazines, specialist stores, classified advertisements, clubs and postal networks could suddenly move between continents almost instantaneously.
From Underground Codes to Global Visual Culture
Across these seven decades, fetish culture underwent an extraordinary transformation. What began as fragmented visual experiments involving clothing, photography, performance and underground publishing gradually developed into communities with recognizable symbols, spaces, rituals and identities.
The evolution was never linear. Art borrowed from sexuality while fetish communities borrowed from military clothing, motorcycle culture, medicine, industrial design and fashion. Queer communities transformed ordinary objects into identity symbols, photographers translated those symbols into images, magazines distributed the images internationally, and designers eventually returned those underground references to mainstream culture in altered forms.
By the end of the twentieth century, leather, latex, rubber, corsetry, harnesses, masks, uniforms, high heels, restraints and industrial aesthetics had travelled extraordinarily far from the contexts in which many of their fetish associations had developed.
The internet would accelerate this circulation beyond anything the twentieth century had previously made possible.
Related Concepts
For this particular pillar, I would keep the Index links very selective:
Written by Otávio Santiago
Founder of Atomique Fetish, an editorial platform exploring fetish design, culture & visual research.
Visual research continues at @atomique.fetish ↗
