Vintage fetish & Fashion

There is a thin line between (vintage) fashion and fetish, that is why I do my research for both subjects. Some Fashion items later evolved into fetish, or perhaps they were fetish from the start but introduced as fashion? Think about subjects like lingerie, hats, shoes, gloves and accessoires. Photography was used to sell, to inform and to entertain. The photos at this site were perhaps once produced to sell (clothing or lingerie) but also subject for entertainment by those aroused by these fashion items which somehow became fetishes by themselves.
To browse the various items at this site use the menu on the left top or let yourself be suprised by clicking photos or links on this page.


Maud D'Orby was model for both Jean Agelou as Charles Reutlinger

Since the advent of photography in the mid-19th century, the new medium has been used to create a wide variety of erotic spanking and other fetish-related pictures (depicting birching, whipping, bondage, etc.). For over a century, black and white adult spanking photos were produced in surprising quantities and privately sold as an illicit, under-the-counter commodity.

In most countries, the law made little distinction between these images and blatant pornography until the late 1960s. By that time spanking photographs had been appearing in underground fetish specialty magazines and booklets for over two decades. In the early 1970s, slick, newsstand-quality periodicals entirely devoted to the spanking subculture (featuring glossy full-color reproductions) entered the mainstream market. These publications would proliferate until the Internet era came to dominate the industry in the late 1990s.


Ostra Studio produced many sensual spanking photos

In the early days of photography there was a legitimate niche market for non-erotic nude photos produced for artists in the study of contour, modeling, proportion, and gesture. These carefully posed images emulated the classical art of antiquity, especially Greek sculpture and paintings by the old masters. For example, well-known French photographer Louis Igout (1837 – 1881) specialized in showing multiple images from various angles of a single pose similar to the scientific studies of Eadweard Muybridge (1830 – 1904). This type of work legitimized the study of the nude figure and paved the way for all sorts of experimentation with non-artistic erotic photography.

The earliest spanking photographs date back to the 1850s.

Schoolgirls was a favorite subject in erotic spanking photography

The 1920s saw a sharp increase in images of erotic bondage and sadomasochism. In addition to playful domestic paddlings and classroom canings, we see the introduction of the cruel, leather-clad dominatrix. She exists in the dark world of the torture dungeon which is stocked with all sorts of nefarious devices. Helpless slave girls are bullied and bound, chained and whipped, and humiliated in every way imaginable. Also around this time, femdom images of submissive men being dominated by powerful women began to appear more frequently.


Vintage FemDom photos are still rare to find

Interest in punishment images with fetishistic leather and rubber clothing and various BDSM practices such as doggie training and pony play grew until the end of the 1930s. The most well-known suppliers of this period were based in Paris: photographer Jacques Biederer (Biederer Studio and Ostra Studio) and fetish wear/photo seller Yva Richard. The upheaval of the Second World War, with Germany occupying France from 1940 to 1944, and the long reconstruction period that followed, put an end to this era of fetish photography in Europe. Biederer died in a German concentration camp during the war. Yva Richard and most of her contemporaries faded away and never returned to the fetish industry. Over in New York, Biederer's American counterpart, Charles Guyette, built up a thriving business making and selling fetish photos and exotic bondage-wear items in the 1930s and '40s.


Lingerie photographs for Diana Slip Lingerie