While latex has been used in clothing since the mid 19th century, with one of the earliest rubber related fetish organizations (The Makintosh Society) founded in 1920, for most the 20th it has held a special relationship with popular culture and media. Typically lurking on the fringe of fashion, it gained a more substantial grip on the collective consciousness of modern culture with the advent and proliferation of TV (especially the, for the time, "edgey" world of music videos) and the emerging internet. Now often found on the cutting edge of fashion, music, and film latex and rubber garments have been used to convey everything from unnatural ellegance to temptation to a sense of seductive depravity.
This series of posts will take a look back, starting in the 80s and 90s, at the evolution and use of latex and rubber in popular media and culture as it has transformed from a niche kink within a relatively unknown subgroup into a more widly accepted representation of sex, pleasure, fashion, and elegance.
Where possible I will attempt to give credit to the designers or fashion houses.
We will begin with a duet of a music video by Busta Rhymes and the icon Janet Jackson. Recorded and released in 1999, while not the first (by any stretch of the immagination) video to use a mixture of latex, vinyl, and leather as a visual element it is unique in it's excessive use of CGI to compliment the material and frame it front and center as the focus. The video itself is a work of art, a piece of futurism by two particularly talented artists and presents the viewer with a, while sometimes campy, for the time risque and explicit presentation of sensuality. Viewers are treated to a number of themes that run parallel to unique kink such as latex/rubber fetish, dominiation/submission, and even a possible drone kink trigger. It's easy to see how an impressionable youths sexuality could be influenced by this particular work (as I'm sure mine was).
Lissik
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