Just an excerpt:
More recently, to hear it from the prostitutes themselves, down-market variations on that patrician theme have been reduced to a series of musty clichés.
“Fashion doesn’t produce a vast range of ideas of what female sexuality looks like,” said Annie Sprinkle, a writer, sex educator and former prostitute. Stereotypes abound, she noted, with the upper echelons of the profession embodied by the aspirational up-and-comer cloaked in cashmere and silk and the role-play specialist dressed in pinstripes or a schoolgirl smock. The more down-market variations flaunt fishnets, kinky boots, hot pants, fur chubbies and harnesses.
It’s a visual code dating at least from the ’70s, tatty and archaic even then. Yet it is routinely resurrected by top-tier designers including Marc Jacobs, John Galliano and Alexander Wang, each gussying up his offerings in sumptuous fabrics or in a mash-up of fetish, athletic and military gear, to tamp down the steamy aggression and make the look palatable to an affluent clientele.
The gambit works. “In the disco era, fashion was inspired by drag queens and prostitutes,” said Tom Fitzgerald, one half of Tom & Lorenzo, an opinionated fashion blog. “Fashion in general is always borrowing from street wear, and it doesn’t get more street wear than hooker.”
Those references, fixtures in the lexicon of style, are mainstream now. “Is there a specific sex worker look anymore?” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “Or does it all get pulled from the sexy pile at Forever 21?”
Like hip-hop and grunge, “the look has been normalized,” he said. “It’s never been more respectable.”
Or apparently more covetable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/27/s...de-runner.html