“I cannot say of any consumer product I have bought that it ‘gets me here,’ if here is someplace new,” the novelist Sheila Heti wrote in a 2018 essay on consumerism. Therein lies the inherent tragedy of shopping: the candle or sweater that throbs with our power to purchase it becomes “inert with being owned.” My friends and I, still relatively new to the world of material adulthood when we encountered Heti’s analysis, were so struck by it that we distributed a batch of postcards printed with her cycle of material entrapment: Buying > Waiting > Limbo > Unreality > Magical thinking > Disappointment > Need > Buying.
I remembered these postcards with force while reading Anastasiia Fedorova’s “Second Skin,” a book of personal reportage from the world of fetish cultures. Fetish, as Fedorova describes it, is a realm of sexual attraction orbiting around objects: leather masks that transform their wearers into nonhuman personae, a classic BMW that invites passionate, secretive encounters. A sneaker fetishist named Miss Gold describes the erotic thrill of Nikes, which emanates from the shopping process: “Selecting a pair, purchasing them, their arrival in the mail, the opening of the box, first spying the fresh trainers as she unwraps them.” Far from becoming inert upon purchase, the Nike Air Max 95s to which Miss Gold is partial grow only more transgressively powerful when she walks through a pool of piss in a public bathroom. For the fetishist, Fedorova argues, the magic of a chosen item never has to wear off.
Fedorova’s childhood in post-Soviet Russia introduced her early on to the “spiritual aura” of branded commodities. Now a writer and curator based in London, she writes shrewdly about how we imbue objects with meaning and status. “Second Skin,” her first book, is in part an assertion that we all might learn something from fetishists, who exist in playful surrender to the things that they covet. A foot fetishist and leatherman she calls D, who is partial to skeletal feet with “large, strong nail beds and toes that look like talons,” emphasizes the existence of a physical quality that is immediately recognizable to the fetishist but remains otherwise indescribable. This quality is clearly sexual but distinct from beauty. “I look at some people’s feet,” D says, “and think, ‘They can save my life.’ ”
Fedorova, who herself is enmeshed in London’s kink communities, historicizes these pursuits as a form of resistance for sexual minorities whose desires extend beyond the “state-sanctioned imagination.” The opening chapter finds her and a partner both dressed in full-body latex. In Fedorova’s slightly grandiose construction, they “fuck in the intersection of sexuality, consumption, pop culture, and senseless lust”; really, they are in a carpeted hotel room that smells richly of rubber. The latex catsuit clings to every crevice of Fedorova’s body. She feels freed from gender and transformed into a “thick pulsing vortex.” This scene is a nice introduction to her world, in which feeling like an object isn’t a calamitous side effect of sex but, in some cases, the point. Fedorova asks herself whether she would ever want to have sex naked again.