Design Behind Desire – Luxury Erotic Fashion

The curated collection, by Farameh Media, the book publisher specialising in the highest quality lifestyle publications, is releasing this de luxe art book, with a delicious mix of enticing artwork, fashion and design that appeals to the sense of erotic desire. Read more

Lingerie: A Modern Guide, by Lesley Scott

This is a fabulous book that contains some very interesting facts, pictures and an exciting history of lingerie. The fashion critic and writer, Lesley Scott tells us in the foreword “few items of clothing can so easily create a mood, shift the vibe or set off shivers like the right lingerie.” The first few pages really draw you into the book; the way she explains her love for lingerie in a way that you wouldn’t really think of “perhaps foodie culture is to nutrition what lingerie is to sex: a delicious, extravagant touch of mystery and mastery that makes sex more sensual, less prim and that much more fun.”

To give you a little taster of the kind of thing to expect in this book, I have noted some parts which I found particularly fascinating. The first chapter, called “Lingerie from ancient times to the 19th Century,” offers an insight back to ancient Egyptians. In 3,000 BCE, high-status women in ancient Egypt wore body-conscious under-tunics that fell to the ankle, to show off their position in society, while slaves went naked or wore a loin cloth at most. Moving onto the Minoans, historians found a figurine called the “Snake Goddess,” wearing what could pass as a modern day corset. The “Snake Goddess” was discovered in 1903 by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans and at the site where it was found “the typical signs of a male dominated society were simply not present. The archaeological evidence supports the idea that women dominated Minoan culture.”

Leading on to the ancient Greeks and Romans: Roman women wore a strophium (a band belted over and underneath the breasts, made of soft linen between 6 and 8 inches wide and long enough to be wrapped twice around the body). Roman mothers “who were worried that their daughters would overdevelop made make them wear a strophium, as did fashion conscious women who wanted their tunics to drape as flatteringly as possible.”

According to costume historians, the latter half of the 14th century was the starting point of modern fashion, the time when “for women, the tops of their robes dipped ever lower and décolletage emerged, showcasing high, pert breasts. This, combined with a fashionably curved belly and generous hips, was the ideal figure in the Middle Ages, related, naturally to a woman’s ability to bear children.”

Something I found particularly engrossing was about iron corsets of the 16th and 17th century: “their supposed role as tortuous implements of fashion was undoubtedly a tall tale perpetuated by La Vie Parisienne. This racy, somewhat fetishistic turn-of-the-20th century magazine was probably also responsible for the Victorian myth of the chastity belt, for which no hard evidence actually exists” Wouldn’t you just love to have a read of these La Vie Parisienne magazines? It sounds like a very intriguing publication! In case you were wondering about the Iron corsets, scholars now believe they were solely used as orthopaedic or medical corrective devices.

Then, Lesley Scott goes into Victorian dress; “first stripteases were simply women undressing layer by layer down to their chemises and getting into bed” and she covers the innovation in production leading to new lingerie trends.

If you are more attracted to the start of modern lingerie, chapter three includes a bit about the impact of the First World War and the 1920s “as part of the of the war effort, women were asked to give up their corsets in order to free up steel – which they did – willingly providing more than 28,000 tons worth, enough for two battleships”.

After this, Lesley goes into the Second World War and pin up culture, lingerie from the 1960s and in popular culture (film, music and dance). Then up to the very modern day, including Lady Gaga who “uses her lingerie to titillate and control her audience.” One of the very last parts of the book is on the very surprising topic of “Syria’s extraordinary lingerie culture”.

At the end of the book is a very useful guide called “choosing, buying and caring for your lingerie” which includes a great list of lingerie names you should know, gives you info about the companies and the website details, so you can go hunting for the perfect lingerie that you have just learnt the origins of!

Lingerie: A Modern Guide contains a little bit of everything I love: lingerie, fashion, history, film and music. I would recommend this book, even if you don’t have a passion for lingerie but like to learn about history. I’m sure you would still enjoy the book and it is full of great photos and pictures. The other good things about it is that it is a good starting point: if you really like the bit about the middle ages, for example, it might influence you to go and look into this period in more detail and go searching for other books about it.

Review by Roxanne Dorrington

You can buy the book from amazon.com

Lingerie: A Modern Guide, by Lesley Scott
ISBN 9781408127544
Format: Hardback
Dimensions: 164x138mm
Extent: 224 pages
Illustrations: 150+, full colour throughout

Price: £12.99

About the Author: Lesley Scott is a highly regarded fashion critic and the Editor in Chief of Fashiontribes.com, an online magazine and fashion blog. She was one of the first fashion bloggers accredited by the IMG to cover New York Fashion Week, and was previously a Senior Editor at Coolhunt.net and Executive Editor at Stitch Magazine in New York.

Latex Fashion Photography – Brand new from Goliath Books

If you love latex fashion, you need this great new book on your coffee table! It’s 384 pages of the hottest colour photography of the hottest models in the hottest rubber fashion, all in hard covers – the perfect gift for yourself.
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reBound Shibari Style Impressions – Photography by David Lawrence

reBound is among the very finest editions of Japanese rope bondage photography yet published – essential for the serious collector. Not a casual purchase, reBound is a major 368-page hardcover volume, printed on quality art paper, with over 550 images – and even a behind-the-scenes section. A culmination of a 5-year project, this is something special.
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How to be a Domme

The Practical Guide to Becoming a Professional Dominatrix - Written by Canadian domina Evangeline Dubois, this comprehensive guide does exactly what it says on the tin. Also known professionally as Mistress D, she lays bare all possible scenarios for the newbie or those thinking of entering the trade.

This 92 page manual is a no holds barred account of the practicalities and pitfalls a pro-domme faces in her day to day adventures. Most “how to” books for the dominant female tend to focus on playtime with a romantic partner but this is strictly business.

 

How To Be A Domme is broken down into five parts which is just as well as there is a lot of content to sink your teeth into. It starts out aptly titled Learning the Ropes, where she covers the ABC of BDSM. She offers practical advice on how to be safe and when to take precautions. The tone of her writing here comes across as sincere with an underlying caveat not to be naïve and to trust your instincts if you feel threatened.

Mistress D then moves on to the nitty gritty of Setting Up Shop, giving an introduction to the fundamentals of the business. No stone is left unturned and she covers everything from choosing your new name to the best types of strap-ons to use with which lubes.

She stresses the fact that what she’s written is just for guidelines. You’re encouraged to develop your own persona and discover your own boundaries and limitations. Additionally, the section on protocols makes good common sense on how to prepare yourself for sessions.

The further you delve through the material, the more in-depth the topics become, particularly once you start roping the clients in. The sections on how to set the scene and the breakdown of a one hour session are useful and if you want to venture into collaring slaves, there are sample contracts to follow.

 

Written to inspire and empower, it’s refreshing that she doesn’t preach or try to “domme” you into doing things her way. She speaks from personal experience and it was obvious to me that she felt the need to extend her years of “wisdomme” to those starting out. Indeed, she wants you to learn from her mistakes, so you can fast track yourself into the business.

The book is not printed on paper – it’s a PDF. The great thing about the PDF format is that you can access it instantly and refer to it again and again. You can keep it on your laptop or iPad. No more wondering where you put that book – and it’s more discreet, too!

This is a thorough account of every imaginable aspect of a pro-domme’s vocation, but at this price I would have hoped for a more colourful or arty presentation. However plain and textbook-like the presentation is, the content is sensible and concise – there’s probably little else out there offering what this does.

What stuck me the most was her genuinely honest approach throughout and at times I could detect an undertone of dark humour thrown in for good measure. Let’s face it; if you’re going to become a Domme, a little humour will go a long way.

How to be a Domme costs $25 Canadian. You can pay in any currency, using most major credit cards, via PayPal or AlertPay. You do not have to have a PayPal account.

See Evangeline Dubois introducing her book here -
http://www.youtube.com/user/MDadmin2010

Buy How to be a Domme here – www.howtobeadomme.com

By Lady Bellatrix
Lady Bellatrix is one of London’s top dominatrixes and her website is here – www.ladybellatrix.com

Rubber Life – Guide to The World of Latex

Rubber Life is the “ultimate beginners guide to the fascinating world of latex” It’s a well designed e-book by 3xL, a male latex fetishist and the creator of a respected rubberists’ website.
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Behind The Whip, by Maria Coletsis – Major New Dominatrix Book

Canadian photographer Maria Coletsis traveled the world to compile this hardcover coffee table book of portraits of top professional dominatrixes in Berlin, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, Bangkok and London. We’ve all seen photos of dominant women in leather and rubber before – but Coletsis goes far beyond just presenting some nice snapshots of dominant women in sexy outfits. Read more

Concertina, the Life and Loves of a Dominatrix, by Susan Winemaker

Tessa Ditner reviews one of the few interesting books by a pro dom

Susan Winemaker is a dominatrix. Before that, she worked as a chef. Concertina begins with her suffocating a regular, flicking his nipples with a coin, dreaming of a feta salad. This isn’t an erotic story. In fact I don’t think there was a single erotic passage in the whole book. You follow her as she welcomes clients into her dungeon and dissects their needs, based on how they look, how they act and what they ask for.

There’s nothing more satisfying than the element of surprise, so I was delighted when Susan’s biggest horror wasn’t the canning, piercing or spitting, but the arrival of a handsome masochist. Her affair with the man is beautifully written, showing that even for a trained dominatrix, human psychology can baffle and torture you.

It’s clear that Susan doesn’t experience erotic pleasure from her work. She enjoys exploring human psychology, she appreciates the art of her craft and she also gets a lot of satisfaction from providing a unique sort of release that normal society doesn’t cater to. But for someone who is so busy moulding herself into the appropriate fantasy, the biggest challenge she has to face in writing about her experience is telling her emotional journey.

Concertina does what Rabelais did in the middle ages, in his novels about the giant Gargantua. They both use food and the biological aspects of the human body to make statements about the sameness of human beings. But unlike Rabelais who lived a cloistered life as a married priest and wrote grotesque stories of giants peeing on Paris, Susan is surrounded by human orifices and therefore uses food to elevate herself out of the heaps of bodies. Food becomes the language of emotions just as it did for that rat in the movie Ratatouille. She escapes the tedium of domination by thinking of ‘watermelon with chilled tomato soup’, from conveying her unique eroticism ‘pared the nipple off each tomato and hand-fed it to the mouth of the machine’ and finally attempting to grip onto a new, self-healing place as she escapes to the countryside ‘I was shocked to discover that wild strawberries tasted of – rather, distinctively suggested – Roquefort cheese.’ Food even saves her from the man she loves as she can’t decide if he’s a misunderstood hero or a brute. The day he calls to say he’s just eaten a whole raw chicken cutlet, minus a bite, without realising it was raw, is the day she finds her answer.

There are times when I wished I’d written this book, other times I was relieved never to have become a dominatrix. It’s a stark reminder that domination isn’t just about pretty clothes and Club Pedestal-type submissives who want to massage your feet. There were also moments when you wish Susan wasn’t such a brilliant writer, particularly when she pulls on her rubber gloves. Then you get the grotesque combination of the following: an NHS nurse, Dita von Teese, a clear sandwich bag of money and the smell of entrails.

Tessa Ditner
Concertina: The Life and Loves of a Dominatrix is published by Simon & Schuster and available from Amazon and from most bookstores.

Loving Dominant by John and Libby Warren

John and Libby are a couple that knows just how colourful the BDSM scene is, with its wide range of things to choose from depending on you and your partner’s tastes, cleverly likening it to a very liberal Chinese Restaurant. “You can take as many, or as few, items as you want from Column A, B, and so on.”

Because it seems that, over the years, media and society have managed to confuse BDSM with cruelty and undesired maltreatment, John and Libby seek to re-teach the population with this sexual self-help tour de force. I

t is the perfect beginner’s guide and manual to the how-to’s of forming and establishing a loving, safe and consensual DS relationship, with the detailed down-lows on everything from basic bondage ties, finding toys in the vanilla world, performing successful fantasy scenes, to how to win over your other vanilla half, filming your kinky escapades, establishing contracts of submission, and precautions and first aid for your play.

Its emphasis isn’t only on getting started in the physical sense, but also touches on the psychological aspects of your play and ‘the scene’; an aspect often ignored in other books, but which is probably the most important. They take it very seriously, and sometimes treat BDSM much like a course on the curriculum, going as far as to include workbook-like sections with diagrammed kinky D.I.Y. projects to try, not to mention a wealth of suggested reading and resources specific to each topic as you go along. It’s ceaselessly knowledgeable and no doubt retains its status, through each new and updated edition, as the curious and responsible couple’s bedside companion.

The Loving Dominant
(third edition)
by John and Libby Warren
Published by Greenery Press www.greenerypress.com
£10.99

Love Me Like You Hate Me by Venus O’Hara and Erika Lust

We’ve seen a few books about kinky sex here at Skin Two. There are geeky and well-intentioned ones that are worthy but not terribly appealing. There are weighty tomes by learned academics with no feel for the subject at all. There are glossy pot-boilers from big publishing houses based on the ‘sex sells’ school of marketing. There are very few that we would recommend to a friend. Love Me Like You Hate Me is one of the few… Read more

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