Corsets. High heels. Thigh-high leather boots. Tattoos and body piercing. What do they mean? Historically grounded and abundantly illustrated, Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power charts the boundaries of the normal and `perverse', showing how even the most unusual clothing fetishes enable their wearers (male and female, gay and straight) to use clothing to express their social and sexual identities.
Fashion historian Valerie Steele considers how fetish fashion has gone mainstream, from Gianni Versace's controversial collections to Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman suit, and asks what this tells us about social and sexual identities. 30 colour, 74 halftone illus.
Steele is to fetish dressing what Anne Rice is to vampires.
