![]() ![]() I wasn’t sure how I’d explain to my family that I was doing burlesque and I was a bondage model, and in the end everyone thought I was crazy. Everyone around me was worried when my career started to take off. I started working as a babysitter at 13, then got a job when I was 15 at the aforementioned lingerie store. We didn’t have money, so my parents weren’t going to put me through further education. Nobody cared what I did after graduating – there was no one pushing me to do well or saying: “You’re going to college.” I did OK at school – I always excelled in grammar and writing but I was very bad at maths. Instead I would study photos and movies from the golden age and practise and perfect the craft. There were no real role models from modern times that I had anything in common with, and there were no YouTube tutorials either. Discovering that I could be self-created was an important lesson for me. I had curled my hair and there was this perfect light, so I took a Polaroid of myself and thought: wow. I’ll never forget when I first got my hands on red lipstick: I was at home and put on a Cherries in The Snow Revlon lipstick. Growing up, I was really interested in 40s and 50s glamour – during my childhood my mother and I would often watch movies from that era. We used to do photoshoots at a place called Danny’s Hardware – the woman who ran it learned to write code and made the first adult website with images of models on. We ended up making one of the first websites for images of women – people could send in a cheque and I’d send back autographed pictures. So I got some photos done and showed them to him, but he turned out to be more interested in the girl in the photo than the real girl.Īround that time he had also told me about “this thing called the worldwide web”. I don’t have any terrible stories from that time because I was working with the best in the industry.Īs well as admiring Bettie Page, one of the other reasons I wanted to start posing for photos was because my boyfriend was addicted to porn and I wanted to be like the girls in the magazines he was looking at. ![]() While I was only 19 at the time, I felt safe and was always clear about my boundaries. Often men just wanted to watch me try on gloves or walk around in high heels. I found it fascinating to meet people who liked to watch women smoking, or had foot fetishes. When I started working in the fetish industry, it wasn’t about nudity: it was a lot more about the mind than the body. It made me wonder why nobody was doing the vintage fetish thing, and in that moment a whole new world opened up for me. ![]() He was super nice and showed me all these photos of 50s pinup Bettie Page. There was this gentleman sitting behind the counter who’d go on to become a friend for life. Going into that mysterious place could have scared me but it actually sparked my entire career. When I drove over there, I realised it was a really hardcore fetish store. It turned out to be a pivotal item for me: while working in a lingerie store, I asked a girl where I could get a corset and she wrote down the address for this place I should visit. This was just before I first dyed my hair black, and the corset in the photo was the first one I bought. I was having so much fun with all the club kids and drag queens, discovering psychedelic drugs and working as a go-go dancer. My then boyfriend produced the biggest rave parties in Los Angeles. This was taken during a transformative period for me – I was 19 and living in Orange County. I did my own hair and makeup, and I remember him being a little nervous. I said sure – so we met up and it turned into one of my first proper photoshoots. He was a very shy art student and approached me to ask if he could take my portrait sometime. I met the photographer for this shoot at a late -night dinner. ![]()
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