Fetish Fashion Rules
Walter Van Beirendonck's Provocative Fall Line
A member of the famously radical fashion group, The Antwerp Six, Walter Van Beirendonck always stuns and surprises in his design decisions. His Fall/Winter 2018/19 Menswear show for Paris Fashion Week is no different.
Pushing the envelope, the designer explores the fashionable side of sadomasochism, with nipple exposing rain jackets in flesh pink, dangerous black, nuclear green, and warning sign yellow. The models, all young twinky-types, wear fishnet facial masks with dark sunglasses and giant wader boots.
The young men are often dressed looking ready for anything—from a heavy downpour to a sex dungeon encounter to a nuclear apocalypse. In the words of the inventive designer, Van Beirendonck says: “For me it’s really an allusion to SM… sun and the moon, and that’s slightly the idea behind the collection. To work around a fetish energy and do it in a different way, not clichéd with the ingredients that we see everywhere, everywhere when in fashion we work on fetishism and I really tried to introduce new things.”
And indeed he has.
