"It's really just fashion, no different from shopping in Barneys or Bergdorf's," said Gregory Bunch, a salesman at the Chelsea fetish shop, the Noose.
The key pieces this summer, Bunch said, are leather shorts and a harness. Actually, those are the key pieces every year. "It's too hot now for chaps," said Bunch, who bears a tattoo on his right bicep that reads SLAVE. "If shorts are too hot, you can always wear a studded leather codpiece jock."
Of course you can. Or you can wear, as many did, a latex singlet or bleach-mottled skinhead denims or neoprene jerkins reminiscent of Nicolas Ghesquiere's designs for Balenciaga, or close-cropped mohawks or abraded jeans left half-open or dog collars and leather hoods with zippered mouth and eyeholes and with little puppy ears attached.
"Its a way to express the feelings and emotions of your inner canine," explained Steve Birko, who calls himself Puppy Diesel when dabbling in the burgeoning sphere of what in kink circles is called human animal training, an elaborate form of role play in which the end point is basically sit and stay.
"It's pure feeling, nothing else is allowed to exist but your instincts," said Robert Davis, who together with Birko was being walked by a man called Harding, a gay skinhead whose goatee is groomed into diabolical points and who has not, he claimed, used a surname in years.
One could hardly keep count of the pierced nipples on display at the Folsom Street fair, often adorned with what look like door knockers, and yet worn with nothing more suggestive of a kinky lifestyle than a pair of Old Navy cargo shorts. "Just because somebody's in cargo shorts and flip-flops doesn't mean they don't have a dungeon in their basement," Weis pointed out.
Making assumptions about other people's libidos is typically futile, but at Folsom Street East there was little guessing required. "I'm Dutch, so I'm very liberal," said Rob Tiller, a leather man from Amsterdam, who pointed out that each of the many decisions that went into his elaborate wardrobe (gray leather signi-fying an interest in bondage, for one thing, and an armband worn on the left-hand side to indicate the dominant role) was a code easily deciphered by an initiate. The Pulitzer-winning composer David Del Tredici ambled along in a tank top bearing the unambiguous legend MASTER.
If there was a single dominant (pardon the term) fashion theme of the day, it was takeoffs on the traditional Scottish form of masculine dress; dozens of the men and women (and men who formerly were women) chose to wear kilts to the fair. Among them was a buff shirtless man who wears an altogether different kind of gear for his day job as a Protestant cleric.
"It's fun," and not a lifestyle decision, the man explained, referring to the belted leather kilt manufactured by Stormy Leather. "It only comes out of the closet twice a year."
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