Name: The Baroness
Occupation: Latex Fashion Designer.
Location: The Baroness Fashions, 530 East 13th St.
Time: 2 pm on Thursday, Aug. 29
I’m English, from Banstead, which is slightly to the south of London, but I’ve been in New York forever. I first lived on the West Coast and then I came here in the ‘70s before the first blackout, when New York was scary. The rotten apple. I lived on the Upper East Side for awhile and people kept saying, ‘You live on the Lower East Side, right?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m a fashionable Upper East Sider.‘ And then finally I decided, fuck, I’m a Lower East Side kind of person.
I remember dining at a French restaurant that came into the neighborhood on Avenue C called Bernard’s. It was the only ‘restaurant’ in the East Village. I remember being there and just watching the building across the street go up in flames. And you’re eating fancy French food. You could really see the juxtaposition. I think it was really brave for Bernard to have a restaurant there because we were in the middle of nowhere, but that did add to the cache. ABC, where everybody was like, ‘oh god there’s this hip place where I can go.’ This was the time when women wore these long fur coats, and there were people out there yelling ‘Taxi,’ and it’s like, ‘hey, there’s none on Avenue C, you’re going to have to walk forever to get one, in your floor length coat.’ You’d have to walk through Tompkins Square Park to get a cab. And if by chance you made a wrong turn, you’re going to the projects.
Before latex, I was a costume designer in the film business — for movies, for film, for theatre. Even though I had worked on some great projects and traveling for work was great, I really liked New York and I didn’t like being away for 3-4 months on each job.
And then I got turned on to latex. One day a slave bought a dress for me to pick up. It was a little red dress, short, zip front, sleeveless, not my style. And even though it didn’t fit me, I started a business right then and there, 20 years ago. When I started this I just wanted to dress myself and then I wanted to dress myself for all occasions and then I wanted to dress the people around me. That was it. I had worked with latex before but in the same way that I had worked with clothing in general. I could see so many possibilities. It’s an amazing material. It’s the most sensual of all materials. Latex is bigger than clothing for me. It’s huge.
I started in my studio doing doing wholesale, off the Internet and custom appointments, although people were hesitant to come and try on latex in the studio. They were like, ‘Am I going to be sold into slavery?’ If that was going to happen, I would charge by the hour. I hadn’t thought that I could afford a store and was originally just looking for a workspace but eventually I found this place. The store has made a huge difference
When people think of fetish, they think of black and red, gas masks, full body enclosures and things like that, which is fine, but red and black latex are just too cliche for me. My whole concept for latex was that people could wear it, that they could wear it out on the street and be comfortable and feel attractive in it. I want people not to be scared of latex. When I want them to be scared of latex I will do that. We’ve got the body bags, the inflatable straight jackets, the sucky bed — we’ve got the weird stuff too. I have some clientele who are looking for that but that’s a really specific person and unfortunately there are not enough of them.
Our main clientele ranges from a lot of stylists, to stars, to people in the neighborhood. When Lady Gaga did the entrance to the Grammys in the big egg, we dressed all those people. Nicki Minaj has been wearing some of our stuff recently. You get people who come in and their first purchase is usually a black skirt. We get mostly women even though we have a men’s line. I’m really dressing men as opposed to the standard little gimp type person or the gay guy in the little pair or shorts or thong. We also do a lot of stuff for events. For the big fetish events we’ll get a lot of custom orders. A lot of my work is custom.
There’s just not enough of us; There are not enough perverts out there, I think. I started to throw these fetish parties because I’m a fetishist and I like parties and I like people to dress up. And one of my big fetishes is the fetish of dress. I throw the longest running fetish party in New York, called Retinue. Each month there’s a different theme. My goal with that event was to inspire people to look into this life. Fetish can be latex, leather, cross-dressing, being a giant butterfly — it can be anything. It’s really just the concept of dress.
I think the community is incredibly small. Right now it has changed a lot. The whole scene has changed as far as dominatrix goes. It used to be in the old days, mistresses would have their slaves and the slaves would be in complete adoration of them, specifically. Now you have more college-age chicks who are kind of doing this gig cause it’s easy. And you don’t get that loyalty with the men. If someone’s going to be a slave, in my mind, we’re talking about a commitment like a marriage. They basically represent you. It used to be that people knew who was owned by who and how to behave and there’s less of a requirement now and very few people seem to have that.
When latex was fresh and new I really worked on pushing it out to the mainstream. I wanted to see it out on the street and I had a whole philosophy about that. And now that it’s out we’ve lost a lot of the body bags, the dark stuff, the really interesting stuff is gone because it’s so public. That reminds me of this neighborhood.
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) and chashama, the acclaimed New York City non-profit that supports artists by giving them space to create, will unite to kick off Fashion Week 2013 with DIRECT ACTION FASHION HAPPENS.
Designed to celebrate and educate about the often-ingenious, always-quirky use of fashion to drive positive social change, DIRECT ACTION FASHION HAPPENS will take place tonight 6:30-8 at Anita’s Way, West 42nd to West 43rd Streets between Sixth Avenue and Broadway.
With New York City’s own radical marching band, Rude Mechanical Orchestra, providing the soundtrack to a photo exhibit that includes images from MoRUS’s inaugural Direct Action Fashion Show held last February, DIRECT ACTION FASHION HAPPENS is free and open to the public.
“It’s exciting to have our organizations, both of which are active in reclaiming public space, collaborate in Times Square during Fashion Week to present an alternative view of fashion — one that celebrates how garments and accessories can be used to promote social change versus corporate gain,” says Laurie Mittelmann, co-director of MoRUS.
Thanaruek "Eh" Laoraowirodge has been feeding the people of Bangkok somtum der, a version of green papaya salad that's native to his hometown of Khon Kaen in the northeastern Isan region of Thailand. "Thai people like to eat this kind of food," he explains. "We focused on the authenticity of papaya salad. Most papaya salad in Bangkok adjusted to the Bangkok palate."
[U]nlike some other hot Asian spots (hello, Mission Chinese) the venue skips a purposely hip decor in favor of a no-frills room.
And about those dishes: the more, the merrier. The menu is affordable, and after we asked for the check, we pulled a "actually, can we see a menu again," and ordered a second round of appetizers and entrees.
“Dr. Doom” economist Nouriel Roubini has been forced to remove his giant hot tub — famed for being packed with hot young models at his wild parties — from the roof of his Manhattan penthouse by the city.
Roubini, dubbed Dr. Doom for predicting the financial crisis, ran afoul of the Department of Buildings after he did not get approval for the tub, large enough to hold 10, and the wooden roof deck he had built at his East First Street bachelor pad for his boisterous bacchanals.
