Some people wear bondage to spice up their lives in the bedroom, others find the aesthetic of bondage appealing, and some just think it looks cool enough to wear everyday. I started noticing Bondage-style attire when I was living in New York. Every year the Big Apple hosts a massive leather festival and I came across people sporting different looks and I was immediately intrigued!
A lot of classic shots would mostly sport women in light bondage, like a choker, but I was surprised to see how very few men wore it in a fashionable sense. Today there are a lot more high fashion shots with guys wearing it, but I wanted to incorporate it into what I call “today wear”.
When I watched the Oscar’s this year, I saw Adam Rippon, an Olympic Figure Skating Champion and now gay icon wearing actual bondage attire on the red carpet! It made such a buzz on social media and magazines like OUT and Paper magazine were all praising him for his distinctive individuality. It was seen as a staple of expressing one’s sexuality, and I aspired to do the same.
The Naledi’s was my first major award show that I was nominated to attend. It’s fun pushing the envelope and creating that freedom to explore, so I wanted to both make a good first impression to the Theatre world in South Africa, and make a bold statement. The Harness definitely made the statement and it made me feel and look good, and that’s what I was aiming for
Vir.Ander, the play that I’m in and was nominated for, speaks about the oppression of the Afrikaans Boy and the expectation of how he should act to be assured he is a “man”. The harness tells a little bit of that for my character and how strapped down we all are to meet the expectation of what our parents think we should be.
I aspire to be a progressive thinker in both my craft and what I wear. The bondage attire for me was to put a high class spin on something that is socially seen as “dirty”, 
“taboo” or something restricted to “behind closed doors”. I believe being comfortable in your own sexuality is attractive, and I hope that is the positive image I created.
The idea of the harness came rather easily to me. Finding the harness was not so much. It would appear that a lot of leather stores in South Africa mostly sell biker attire, which is a different aesthetic.
I even researched and went to a lot of adult stores and found mostly things for women, but the look and feel was a little more “playful” and I was looking for something serious. The best place in Gauteng to get something closer to what I needed was DifferentStroke, Amazon as well Esty, but they are a little bit pricey.
My hope is that more people will start thinking about what they would want to be seen in and what they’ve always found interesting and start incorporating their style around that, not the other way around. If we don’t do that then all we’d wear is black, grey and navy blue, and that’s utterly boring.
By: Morné Vogel
