Joining us at Rubber Cult on April 26th to celebrate an epic accomplishment, as my dear friend Krystina Kitsis has reached 40 year anniversary for ECTOMORPH. Our stage performer Lady Margo and myself will be showcasing some of her designs on stage.
Krystina's words..."Ectomorph started as a result of a series of serendipitous events. Having investigated fashion’s relationship to sexuality as a research thesis at the Royal College of Art I found myself looking into fetishism and became fascinated by it. At that time fashion was preoccupied by tight clothing with designers like Azzedine Alaia who used elasthane to create figure hugging fashion. And photographers like Helmut Newton, David Bailey and Mapplethorpe explored fetish themes in their work.
Ultimately, all this coincided with the first fetish related club Skin Two in February 1983 which started in Stallions in Soho in 1982. (It later became Maitress with the change of ownership of the club). I attended this from the opening night as I knew one of the organisers Daniel James and I took photographs at the event and used them to illustrate my thesis.
40 Year Anniversary
Graduated from the RCA that summer and had decided by then that I wanted to return to designing clothes as I had a degree in fashion and textiles from St Martins School of Art and had ideas about putting a latex collection together. A fortuitous meeting with a guy Ian Henderson through artist friends of mine, who had a shop on the Kings Road called Quasimodo. He invited me to design a collection in latex and put it into that shop.
Excitedly the collection began to take shape and after encountering Tim Woodward at stallions who showed me his first edition of Skin Two magazine . Myself and my partner at that time suggested to Tim that we should launch our own fetish nightclub calling it Skin Two as the original had transgressed into Maitress due to the tabloid exposure of its founder David Claridge who had an alter ego as Ronald Rat as so no longer wanted to be associated publicly with the scene. Tim had by then copyrighted Skin Two. We felt we could provide a di[erent club environment that was more fashion oriented and for young people like myself to go to. It was of course the arrogance of youth that spurred that idea and the fact that I had spent many years going to clubs like the Blitz, The wag, Heaven, Legends, etc I was fascinated by subcultures having been involved with Skinheads at school in its very early days, then hippy culture, New Romantics at St Martins then Goth. Punk was a source of fascination, but one I never got involved in I treated these subcultures like they were fashion collections, they were inspirational resources.
Subcultured life
Ectomorph and Skin Two evolved simultaneously the latter being the location of the launch of my first collection. This took place in the Embassy Club in Bond Street on the night of Thursday July 18th 1985. I had no idea whether I could make a living from making fetish clothes but I was prepared to try and the fashion show that I organised which included other latex designers like Kim West and Pure Sex proved to be a great success.
Great write -up in the Guardian written by Sarah Mower. My collection went straight into Quasimodo and I never looked back. Skin Two which I was involved in for a couple of years continued then Tim carried it on into the Skin Two Ball (idea of employee Michelle Olley) and I expanded Ectomorph selling eventually to over 40 boutiques, as they were called at that time mainly in Europe and the USA.
Ectomorph 40 years on
Over the years I have seen the scene change from a secretive underground subculture to a recurrent go-to look for fashion stylists and red carpet celebrities who want to throw a bit of controversy into their image. Plus the number of companies now selling latex has proliferated from the handful that existed in the mid 1980s.
First collection took inspiration directly from the pages of fashion magazines. I introduced the peplum which no one in the scene had heard of . As a jacket it was combined with jodhpurs or a pencil skirt. I combined lace with latex and fashioned long mermaid skirts all inventive at the time. My first collection was in white as the fashion world was not quite ready for the radical onslaught of SM imagery. When I showed my work during Fashion Week people used to feel the garments and ask if people really wore this stuff, or just laughed at it.
Fortunately there were many like minded boutique owners who were prepared to buy the collection and I continued annually to introduce new styles. Our palette of colours was limited as Four D at that time were the sole suppliers of latex sheeting and were not open to suggestions of new colours. It took Radical to come along and shake up the supply chain.
Anniversary celebration at Cult
Thankfully the journey has been an interesting one and led me into meeting a lot of different people from all walks of life. Ectomorph took me all over the world, mainly Europe, where I sold to lots of shops and obtained a lot of publicity in the pages of Vogue, Elle, I.D. magazine, etc. Paper publications that has now been lost through the establishment of the internet and social media platforms. I feel sad about the loss of that tactile relationship with the public but, of course, life moves on and I did embrace the internet. I set up an online company which in the end saved me, as many of the shops that I supplied started to make their own clothes. It also meant I had a direct relationship with the end user, the public. I started selling through fetish markets too like London Alternative Market and Le Boutique Bazaar and London Fetish Fair (no longer in existence ). These provided a window into which I could build on my relationships with people and meet my audience directly.
Congratulation to my dear friend Krystina
Recent collections have explored working with latex as a quilted texture that could be moulded into wearable garments. My initial inspiration was taken from Pierpaolo Piccioli for Moncler who had created an incredible theatrical collection using quilting in theatrical ground length duvet coats and maxi a-line dresses. I used the fashion trend for exaggerated shaped and block colour to create oversized shapes in capes and skirts but also more wearable styles like Biker Jackets and Tailcoats.
In conclusion, for me latex has endless possibilities and I hope to work with it in the coming years."
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