SEXUALITY & STYLE

SEXUALITY & STYLE

Sexuality exerted an increasingly strong impact on style during the 1990s. The openly gay designer Gianni Versace (1946-1997) drew on the iconography of 1970s gay “leather sex” for his infamous 1992 “bondage” collection. Although some women took offense at his “S&M” clothes, others regarded them as a positive expression of female sexual power—or simply as the latest fashion. Already in the 1980s, Claude Montana and Azzedine Alaia had pioneered the use of leather in high fashion. Today leather and uniforms have become part of the vocabulary of fashion for both men and women.