Description
Underground fetish catalogs like Caprice Catalog No. 6 were never intended for mainstream circulation. Sold quietly through mail-order networks, men’s magazines, and coded classified advertisements, publications like this occupied a shadow world somewhere between commercial catalog, underground erotica, and social document. Before the internet—and long before fetish culture became visible in mainstream fashion or media—small operations like Caprice Corset Co. supplied corsets, restraints, leatherwear, rubber garments, and bondage apparatus to a hidden clientele operating almost entirely through discretion and the postal service.
What makes pieces like this especially fascinating now is the collision of innocence and severity in the graphic design and language. The catalog matter-of-factly lists “discipline restraints,” “heavy duty anklettes,” rubber body sheaths, corsets, and gag devices alongside modest black-and-white product photography and utilitarian pricing. Most importantly, the striking cover image reproduces artwork by legendary fetish illustrator John Willie, creator of Bizarre magazine and one of the defining visual stylists of twentieth-century bondage and fetish culture. His imagery helped establish the visual grammar later absorbed into underground comics, punk graphics, fetish photography, and alternative fashion culture throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Provenance from Eric Kroll’s collection adds further significance, given Kroll’s own decades documenting and preserving fetish imagery and underground erotic publishing history.
An increasingly uncommon piece of American underground fetish ephemera from the pre-internet mail-order era.
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