Abstract
This statement of practice sees Skeeter of Mr. S Leather in San Francisco in conversation with Tom Cubbin about the role of craftsmanship in the development of products sold within the gay leather and fetish scenes. In her thirty years at Mr. S, Skeeter has fostered craft and making practices that have expanded from leather aimed primarily at gay men, to a multi-material business that caters to ever wider forms of kink and fetish practices. The discussion explores how new products are developed, produced and quality-tested in relation to broader leather and kink communities. Skeeter also shares her experiences of her journey from the women’s kink community in London to running the production, research and development at one of the largest producers of male bondage and fetish gear.
For the part thirty years, Skeeter has been a key maker and inventor at the gay leather and fetish company Mr. S Leather. When she joined the business in 1989, it was a small store selling leather, pants, jackets and harnesses to a local community on Folsom Street in San Francisco – but has since grown to be an international mail order company producing and selling fetish wear and equipment in a wide range of materials. Like many businesses in this industry, handmaking on the premises is still the major mode of production. As head of production and overseeing research and development, Skeeter plays an important role in materializing fetish and bondage objects that will appeal to the broader communities of sexual practice to which the company caters.
I had wanted to interview Skeeter for some time, after hearing that she had updated some designs produced by Jim Stewart – a fellow Brit who originated many of the types of straightjackets, sleep-sacks and sensory deprivation hoods that are commonly available from bondage suppliers. Stewart’s skill had been to constantly tinker with his products to produce items that would constrain the body in different ways, and open a range of bondage fantasies to his clients before a formal scene had emerged in the UK. While Stewart is one of the inventors of a range of items commonly sold in fetish stores today, less is known about those who have followed on from him, finding forms and materials to expand the expressive categories of fetish wear and activities.
Like Jim Stewart, Skeeter is a real master of the hood: an item placed over the head for games involving sensory deprivation. With more advanced hoods taking about fifteen to sixteen hours to stitch in leather and costing up to $740 (as of 2020), these are luxury items that must work sensorially for the wearer to have a satisfying “head-trip,” but also be visually satisfying for other participants and/or spectators in a scene. While a paper bag could sometimes do the trick, it is craftsmen and women like Skeeter who have developed material expression and imagery that speaks to core user-groups, while exerting a broader influence in popular culture.
Since the leather scene’s rapid growth in the 1970s and 1980s, a range of other fetishes have taken off among gay men. Rubber and latex fetishism became increasingly popular in the 1980s and 1990s. In the past fifteen years, the “puppy” community of men who dress up with canine masks, harnesses and wear butt plugs as tails has grown into a significant market, as has neoprene as a fetish material. Some former leather parties now cater to a younger generation turned on by sexual sportswear. In the meantime, other practices have more specific material expressions that require high levels of craft such as chastity, a specialty of kinky blacksmiths.
This Statement of Practice is a conversation that explores the role of craft on the development of leather fetishism into the multi-material world of gay fetish we see today. While there are thousands of small businesses, Etsy stores and makers who visit conventions, Skeeter has a unique perspective because of her experience of working with multiple materials, in particular leather, latex and neoprene. The uses of craft are shaped by the different ways in which fetish practices sit within leather and kink communities. Those items whose primary function is restraint and the experience of bondage must control a variety of body types in a particular way. Other items predominantly relate to the feel of certain materials against the skin. While these two aspects commonly occur simultaneously, ideas for bondage designs are often the result of custom requests from clients and must be developed with direct feedback and adjustment from play that emphasize comfort and safety of players. The introduction of material fetishes, on the other hand, frequently occurs through the exploration of new materials to understand how they might fit visually and materially within the current scene. For example, we discuss the introduction of a new fabric that resulted in a range called FuckGear, which follows from the growth of neoprene as a fetish material. These new materials are popular because they are cheaper than leather or latex, machine wash easily, and do not deteriorate from contact with lube and bodily fluids. However, introducing new materials and a way that expresses their “fetishness” is a challenge.
By working in small-batch production in one building, there is a very close relationship between prototyping, those engaged in manufacture and feedback from the local community where they are situated. This way of making, that extends from custom bondage equipment to larger batches of puppy hoods means that Skeeter oversees craft process working on a range of scales that frequently overlap and inform one another.
It was somewhat difficult gaining access to Skeeter. She has a reputation as an ingenious problem-solver, which puts her in great demand within the community and her colleagues do a good job of protecting her time in the studio. The only way to get in contact was to go to the store and be a little persistent. The discussion presented below took place in her studio above the Mr. S store, just off Folsom street in San Francisco in June 2019 ().
Fig 1 Skeeter photographed in her studio above the Mr. S store, just off Folsom street in San Francisco, June 2019. Photograph by author.
Tom Cubbin (TC): Hi Skeeter, nice to meet you and see the range of production here. What is your role here?
Skeeter (S): I run the production department, although I’ve got a lot of people now who are department managers, so the day-to-day production is overseen by other people. I mainly focus on new R&D and design work and prototyping across the business.
The departments are determined by material. So, we have a neoprene department that is quite large and very, very productive. We what we call a “latigo department”, which is more of the harnesses, the belt leather, the bondage equipment. A sub-department of that is the hood department, which makes all the hoods. We also have a garment department, which is working on most of the clothing - anything to do with garment leather.
TC: So that’s a really wide range of making we can dig into! I’m very curious about how these two areas of knowledge – practising kink, and making kink toys intertwine. Both of these can be thought of as crafts, but I wondered what came first for you: making, or kink?
S: Even as a young kid, I was making and building and getting my hands dirty in the mud and the sand and the clay. A lot of what I know has absolutely been by doing and making mistakes - certainly by some really good hands-on teachers. My mum taught me to sew when I was very young.
Kink came for me as a young queer person. Before it was identified as kink in any formal way, it was power play, just sort of being butch and having power exchange, sexual encounters and enjoying that, before it became even formalised or known about kink.
I would, like a lot of us do, go down the hardware store and - you’ve got a bandana, you’ve got some rope, you’ve got some kitchen spatula fun. Yes, so very sort of innocently stumbling upon it, until I realised later in life that, “Wow, there’s actually a whole sort of structure and scene and tools and toys,” which was probably my early to mid-20s, discovering all that.
TC: Where did you first come across the scene?
S: I started discovering it in London in the 80s. We had a women’s leather club called Chain Reaction where we would have music and dance, but we’d also have scenes and do sort of bondage demos.
Squatting in London, without much money, we were making a lot of our own toys and getting bike inner tubes and cutting them up and making little rubber floggers. When I started actually putting things together, it was that combination of real desire for craft and interest of how does it go together and how can I make this work, with that kink interest. But, often, I’d make it for a friend or I’d sort of put something together, as a gift for somebody. But it really started to get very refined when I came to San Francisco.
I arrived, I think, in ’88. I tripped up over this job, because I had a partner at the time who worked at Mr S Leather. It was one of the very small hole-in-the-wall stores that there was at that time. There were several small leather stores and Mr S was one of them. I didn’t know a whole lot. I knew how to bang a rivet and sew, but I learnt a lot on the job and in the job.
TC: What was most challenging, materially, to start working with?
S: Well, leather was the thing we were doing then. You don’t sew it on a domestic machine because it is a lot thicker. It’s got a particular way it folds. And the leather we were getting in those days was a lot thicker and a lot sort of denser, so it was hard to get really fine leathers. So, just learning how to sew leather, how leather makes corners and angles, and how to form it into a hood shape.
It was a little later that we started working with latex, which was a whole other thing. It was very different to making leather, because it was gluing and just a very different material to work with.
Later on we moved into neoprene, which has its own properties. It’s spongy, it’s stretchy. We started trying to do neoprene on these straight needle machines that we used for leather, with the nylon thread. And somebody would put something on and it would stretch and the thread would snap. We needed different machines, we needed stretchy, what we call “woolly thread”, which stretches with the material.
So, that was a learning curve. And we are so fully competent and one of the leaders in the market now on that, it’s interesting to remember how we started.
TC: You have developed an amazing feel for how to sculpt with leather. Who did you learn from?
S: There was a guy that used to work here, when I first started working here; at that point he was probably in his 60 s. Mr Chan.
He’d worked in Hong Kong for years, making those tailor-made suits. He didn’t make the bondage gear, but he would make the pants or the motorcycle jackets. Those pieces were gorgeous, his eye to detail and his craftmanship.
He was here for a long time. Amazing guy, Working in the middle of this big bondage scene surrounded by gay men. He didn’t speak much English but, you know, I wondered often what he thought about it all, but he just did his job beautifully.
TC: And I know that in the 1990s, Mr S took over the license to produce and update classic bondage equipment designed by Jim Stewart of Fetters…
S: Yes, the agreement was made that we would continue to sell some Fetters things, but we also started to develop our own products, but we had the licence to call them Fetters. Because Fetters is such a great name, it had a history to it, people knew it.
I met and worked with Jim several times, on new designs or updating a design. He was an amazing guy, I loved working with him. So, even some of the more rudimentary, early designs of Jim Stewart, we took and we refined. Like the bondage suit was Jim Stewart, the Sci-Fi, the heavy-duty hood, these were all heavy-duty bondage pieces that came from Jim’s brilliant mind. And, over the years, I’ve refined them or sort of modernised them.
I think Jim was an interesting guy, because on the one hand he was this sophisticated upper-class English gentleman. But he had this just kinky mind, like wild kinky mind, and it was all very much to do with bondage – immobilising and predicament bondage. Putting the sex together with the bondage, he kept them very separate. He was very strict about it. Like we took one of his hoods and we opened up the mouth for cock-sucking. And his comment was, “I don’t want somebody cock-sucking in one of my hoods.” As a gay man, he would do bondage with women. So those were very separate issues for him.
TC: When browsing your catalogues, I’m really interested in why new materials or fetishes come along at certain times. Since the 2000s, puppy play grew massively within the scene and it’s a materially focussed fetish with hoods, masks and tails across many materials. The first puppy hoods I could find in your catalogue was from 2003. Could you tell me a little bit about how that whole line developed?
S: Yes. The very first puppy hood we did was in leather and it was called the dog hood. Now, when I look at it, it was very rudimentary. It might have been that we had a customer request for it. And then we had started to notice that customers were asking for this, and so we developed the dog hood. It was based off of a hood made by Jim Stewart. The Sci-Fi Hood is a very boxy, sort of squared-off, very visually attractive hood, with all the studs on it. But it wasn't very streamlined. But we took the base of that and made a dog hood.
The leather puppy hoods are so sophisticated now. Like the lines on them, the shape of the muzzle, what we can do, the different breeds, the different ears, the fold in the ear, the little metal tab in the ear, that can bend it and put personality to it.
And then the neoprene, the same thing, all the different colours, all the different sort of… We’ve got four ear choices, four muzzle choices, so you can make the breed the way you want it. You can have the colours you want. It’s incredible to see how the puppy community has really pushed forward this market and the products that we’ve been able to design.
I love working with the shape of hoods. I love to create and think about who you can make it different. Because in some ways, it’s sort of all been done. You know, a hood is a hood is a hood, and you put different eye or mouth things on it, you put different ear on and come up with something.
My last one was the Scream Hood (after Edvard Munch), which is the one where you’ve got the mitts which zipper to the side of the head. And it’s a very, very deep kind of sensory deprivation hood. Because, if you’ve got your hands locked to the side of your head and you’ve got this very heavy padded hood on, you really are helpless. And you can also then unzip those and have them be mitts or zipped together.
I was very, very pleased with that design, working with it as a sort of sculpture piece, like, “How do I make that all look good?” Because in the early days, we had hoods that were effective and you could play with, but the aesthetic wasn't always beautiful.
TC: But where is the source material for developing those designs? Does it come from clients themselves, or do you work with trend forecasting, like a regular fashion house?
S: We’re always influenced by what are people asking for. Sometimes I develop a product because I’m like, “Five people this month have asked for this, we need to develop this.” And where those ideas come from with people, I’m not always sure. But in itself, bondage, SM, leather gear, people are always wanting new ways to tie each other up. And there’s only, in some ways, a finite amount of ways you can tie somebody up.
So, material use, making things look more streamlined, making things look more modern. There’s a lot of ways that we sort of go with what’s popular right now.
TC: One thing I’m getting from this interview is that besides the material experience, you are also considering the position of your work within a broader visual media landscape.
S: Absolutely. And the other thing, too, is the new fabrics coming out. There are a couple of conferences every year, where they're innovating new textiles and fabrics, which you wouldn’t think is of any interest to us. Something we’ve got, called the FuckGear, which is a whole new department for us, which is this sort or rubberised, thin fabric, which is quite sexy in some ways, and sort of lightweight. When we find these materials we have to think “Is it useful? Is it sexy? And is it fetish?”
TC: So, then, one of the questions that raises is when you push out something new. You mentioned with the puppy masks, and how they are available in leather, rubber and neoprene. Do you get a new idea and think, “I’m just going to try it in this material”? Or are there some things where you say, “We’re going to push this idea out through all these different departments?
S: I think there are some things that are very specific to the material, number one, because it could only be done in that material. I think I always look at other materials, and I’m like, that might work in leather, but then we have to adapt it. We certainly have things that we’ve had in leather for a long time and then neoprene came along and we’re like, “How do we adapt that pattern we've had forever into a neoprene design?”
They don’t always cross over. Like with latex, too, it’s a very different medium and you can’t always do the same thing. And we have customers say, “Oh, I love this leather thing, can I have it in neoprene?” and always explaining to people, “It won't translate.” So, we then have to adapt and morph that idea into that fabric.
TC: And how do you find people to work here in production?
S: That’s a good question and it’s tricky. There are some departments, like downstairs in latigo, with the harnesses, if somebody comes in with an aptitude for hand to eye co-ordination, maybe they're a carpenter or they're a builder or they’ve been a waiter, anything that [involves] hand to eye co-ordination, we can train you from the ground up. In fact, we prefer it. Setting a rivet well, choosing the quality leather and not the stomach end, you're really paying attention, we’ll train you from the ground up.
Things like the neoprene department and the garment department, you need to come in being a sewer, you need to know how to sew. Now, if you’ve never sewn leather, we can train you. But to find people who have worked, let alone in fetish gear, but have worked in leather and neoprene, because we’re one of the very few [places] that do it, it’s not easy.
TC: Will they have studied…?
S: We’ve had some people come in from the art school or textiles school, they might have come from a background of making things of some kind, maybe they’ve made boots. Back in the day, in the ‘80 s, ‘90 s, San Francisco had quite a big garment district. And there were places where they had a lot of sewers and tailors. So, a lot of the skill set left, and a lot of those folks needed work.
So, some of my people who have been with me for a long time, came from that period of time, where they were skilled tailors and sewers. Some of the young people that come along, they're in art school, they're artists, they sew, they make puppets and they're really into the fetish, they're really excited. And, with that kind of enthusiasm, you can usually train people up, too.
TC: I guess one other part of what you do will be around quality control. How does that work for the kind of production you run?
S: It’s a good question. When we’re first prototyping something, whether it’s clothing or bondage gear, we try it on. We’ve got a lot of people who can try it on, we have somebody wear it around for a few days, we have somebody play in it. We have a lot of willing subjects.
So part of the quality control asks is does it work, is it functional, is it comfortable, will it last in the long-term? Then if it is something that works, you get into grading. Are all the sizes appropriate in the grading? So, you do a size run and you try it on people, again.
We then go to production with a final “this is the working prototype sample”. By now it’s done beautifully. The stitching is perfect, the leather is perfect. And my staff know enough now. There’s a piece on the hide where it’s really kind of stretched out called stomach. When you look on the back, it’s very suedey. You don’t use that. Other companies do, we don’t use that on anything.
So there’s already a level of quality that comes from the training. And then, when it’s finished, in every department there is a tabled called the “QC table” and that is then checked by the designated quality control person,
I think there is a great advantage to having a lot of makers who are players.
TC: So lastly, what kind of fetish gear do you see on the horizon, and what will it be made of?
S: I’m always interested in influencing. Is Hollywood looking at the trends and the fashions? For example, with the Marvel comics look today where the superheroes wearing these harness type things. Are we influencing them or are they influencing us? So, I’ll look at something like this and I’ll be like, that could make a very sexy harness.
TC: I saw there was even a set of superhero events at International Mister Leather this year…
S: Yes, because it blends so well, because of the superhero-type look. With different fabrics, you could make a superhero outfit from neoprene or from even this FuckGear and you get that look of a superhero that you couldn’t have done years ago. You couldn’t do it in leather, it’s sort of different. So, I think there is a lot of fetishness around the look. There are certain fads that come along, that really blend together well, and the crossover is huge. Definitely, right now, the superhero and Marvel, there is absolutely a place where I can, as a designer, look through this book and go, “Boom: that would be a great product. How can I make that work?” in the real world, not just in a superhero movie. It’s exciting and I think it really keeps us innovative and fresh.
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Tom Cubbin
Tom Cubbin is Senior Lecturer in Design Studies at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg, Sweden. He is a design historian whose current work explores the role of making in material cultures of sex. His research project “Crafting Desire: An International Design History of Gay Male Fetish Making” is funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Tom has also conducted extensive research into design cultures in the USSR. His book Critical Soviet Design is published by Bloomsbury (2019).