About

I spotted two men walking through Soho in London dressed as though they’d just stepped out of Robert Mapplethorpe's photograph Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979 (supplied).

The leather look (also seen in the drawings by the artist Tom of Finland, for example) has not changed in at least 40 years since Mapplethorpe’s photo and I wondered why men still wore those garments and if not leather, what other “gear” is worn and why?

Not being part of the kink or BDSM community I felt some guilt at contacting strangers I’d found on social media and asking them to dress up for me, especially after then inviting myself into their homes to photograph them. It felt intrusive. The feelings only developed the more I spoke to the sitters who all spoke of the power the garments had.

I came to understand how these clothes are not just to wear, they are to inhabit. They are not an extension of the wearers’ sexual desires, fetishes and fantasies but rather are intrinsic to them. The reason many of the styles have not changed is because they don’t need to. The clothes are not-so-much about being seen as they are about feeling.

They are less decorative garments but more tools to facilitate and enhance sexual fantasies, encounters and activities. The heavy rubber mask that leaves no capacity to see or hear or even speak, the leather suit for a slave polish for a reward and the Lycra to suggest what could be enjoyed, for example. The garments don’t just show, they also tell.

Where it may appear the clothing is designed to hide, consider that perhaps it is actually revealing.

I’m so grateful to the sitters who agreed to take part. I now realise I was essentially asking strangers to share their sexual fantasies with me because these men did so by wearing them. That's why I decided to call the project Flowers. Not just as a nod to Mapplethorpe who inspired it but more because the law of identity.

As Gertrude Stein wrote about a rose being a rose, so flowers don’t grow to look like flowers, rather they are flowers. So this bouquet of sitters with their various kinks, fetishes and desires are who they are in these garments that don’t represent them as much as define them.

(Image credit: Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979. Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Tate Galleries, Scotland)