The project began as my graduate work at university. I have always asked myself questions about gender roles and wanted to visually satirise the culturally defined gender identities. During my final year, the film The Danish Girl was released, which rekindled my attention to the matters of gender and sex as well as to the art of the moving image.
With regards to fetishism, the inspiration came from my daily activities related to fashion, from window-shopping to reading magazines and watching runways. I noticed an increasingly flowering of fetish elements including latex, PVC, bondage, and masks on runways of a broad range of brands, from Alexander McQueen to Balenciaga and Hood by Air. On the other hand, many fashion magazines started to illustrate diverse aesthetics, including androgyny, through fetishist styling.
From this observation, I felt that there was a contemporary appropriation of fetishism. Some years ago, the term used to be perceived as a thing related to the ‘world of dominatrix’, but now it seems it’s depicting non-gender-conformist people. Surprisingly, this idea actually corresponds to a contemporary trend of fetishism, masquerading and cosplaying, which in practice leads population to experience its own fantastical life. With this in mind, I felt the need to overcome a common misconception, and this is how I extracted an idea of ‘neutral fetishism’ which may sound complicated and somewhat ironic for most people.