Saturday, August 02, 2008

vintage catalog; found and uploaded by 3xl

onto his excellent latex fetish blog lust love latex in his entry dated august yesterday.

the slickly animated self page turning catalog is made up of an original catalog he found somewhere and he points out his favourites spreads are:
- Climbing in trees wearing a latex catsuit - page 13!
- Super stylish Chinaman latex outfit - page 15!
- Lying in front of the open fireplace in latex - page 20!
- Having the gang over for a latex picnic/barbecue - page 21!

you can either see the catalog on his blog or click here to see it full screen within your browser window. further clicking will enlarge the pages to their maximum resolution. sadly there doesn't seem to be any way to download the pages independently from the animated display.

Inn Skin dates from the 1970's and were based out of Toronto of all places, although no actual store frount was given - just a discreet post office box.

another collection of catalog pages can be found here and the 1974 prices are bellow. just look at those prices!  i'm guessing it wasn't a full size catalog, rather half size for cheaper printing and mailing. some of the images on the second link illustrate this with the size of the repro dots.



what i find the most interesting thing about it is that they were making a serious effort to bring latex wearing to a mass and open fashion market more than thirty years ago. there is considerable amount of coloured latex on these pages and styles that are loose and flowing. this is a surprising contrast to the deep black, tight and shiny look that came out of the UK. although climbing trees and having a BBQ in latex isn't probably the brightest of ideas.

the designs themselves don't look to be terribly sophisticated by todays standards but they get high marks for the range and colours they are using. i do actually quite like the super wide leg slacks in the photo above. 

the photo style is very remenicient of department store catalogs from the time (which we seemed to have a collection of in the hall closet). so really aiming to make latex a contemporary fashion than say its fetish item.

the second set of catalog images came from a five year old and very rudimentary geocities site by Mr & Mrs Bodysuit who decribe it as "a page dedicated to promoting ordinary latex wear."

i'll drop them an email and see how they are these days.

xx

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