It’s amazing what a fuss people can make about a simple fabric, and what a devastating effect prejudices against a perfectly common and harmless kink can have. Here’s part of a Graun article on John Sutcliffe of AtomAge, clothing label and magazine:
‘…Sutcliffe’s designs came out of personal obsession. When his weakness for leather was diagnosed as a symptom of mental illness, he went through a breakdown and a divorce, gave up his engineering job and moved out of the family home. But his motorcycle suit brought requests for similar outfits, and an unexpected career shift. Working out of a loft on Drury Lane in a building occupied by the shoe-makers Anello & Davide, Sutcliffe used his engineering knowhow to transform leather – notoriously hard to stitch – rubber and vinyl into “weatherproofs for lady pillion riders”. He designed a sewing machine for leather and approached Singer to manufacture it. “Singer were so horrified,” recalls his friend Robert Henley, “they called the police.” His experiments with rubber also brought a sticky encounter: Henley came into the studio one day to find Sutcliffe lying on the floor, gasping, almost killed by the toxic fumes of a rubber glue he’d invented.
Sutcliffe went on to make Marianne Faithfull’s all-in-one outfit for the 1968 film Girl On A Motorcycle and influenced Emma Peel’s leather catsuits for the cult TV series The Avengers. With the artist Allen Jones, he designed some extremely rude waitresses’ uniforms for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (they were never used), and his work was an inspiration for Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s punk-era boutique Sex. But AtomAge remains Sutcliffe’s greatest achievement. It made extreme fetish outfits look as threatening as a car boot sale in Cobham, normalising something previously seen as shameful.
It was Henley who suggested publishing the magazine, which ran from 1972 until 1980 and captured that particularly British ability to combine kinkiness with a suburban sensibility. “It wasn’t pornographic, but it stirred up a lot of fuss,” Henley says. “It was terribly popular, but very hard to find an outlet for. When we finally convinced a bookshop in Victoria to stock it, people would queue for hours to get a copy.”
Readers were encouraged to send in photographs of themselves in their favourite outfits, resulting in a woman in head-to-toe rubber before a mantelpiece with a photograph of the kids on it, a man hosing down a caravan in leather waders and a gas mask, or a rubber-clad man on a ladder, by a shed, apparently engaged in some sort of sadomasochistic DIY. AtomAge introduced the uninitiated to such diversions as wading (walking through a river at night encased in rubber) and total enclosure. E.E.D. of Middlesex claims in a reader’s letter that after sitting around the house for an hour or so in head-to-toe rubber, he feels “wonderfully relaxed and at peace with myself”…’
Full article here.
