The Persistence of Samuel Cirnansck’s Bondage Brides

We had been talking about marriage. Would she ever get married? She sent me a photo from Brazilian designer Samuel Cirnansck’s summer 2012 show, during which models strutted his designs in various stages of restraint. No one in fashion was really shocked — bondage is a persistent theme, and just three months before Marc Jacobs had taken fetish to new heights in a show for Louis Vuitton at the Cour Carrée du Louvre, complete with cage elevators, 18-carat gold and diamond-encrusted handcuffs, corsets, thigh-highs, edgy military fashions most suitable to role playing, leather galore, and a cast of French maids and butlers to look after the attendees and the models. The wedding industry on the other hand…

Let’s just say the wedding industry doesn’t like to be reminded of its origins as an institution that traded in women as one might any other type of property. It has spent a great deal of resources and energy rebranding the bride as special, the centerpiece of the event, the queen, the owner of the Special Day — and it has a lot to lose. Estimates of the wedding industrial complex put that sector at around $70 billion in revenue. An American wedding costs $28,427 on average — and in bigger cities, costs come much closer to $50,000, with New York taking the cake with a $76,687 average.

And in struts Cirnansck with his crooked, slightly indecent smirk, festooning models in shibari and bit gags as easily as he does lace and embroidery in his bridal line.

It’s telling that after two years, people are still circulating images of his “bondage brides.” A search for this phrase on Google Images or Tumblr (once you turn filtering off) renders several images from Cirnansck’s show on the first page of results, though often without attribution or context. Well, here’s the context:

What is it about this imagery that just won’t leave us alone?