The event was held at the Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Show sponsors Stockroom.com and their subsidiary Syren Latex, lined the stage and the upstairs VIP area with posters by photographer Steve Diet Goedde of the latest BDSM gear and rubber couture.
“Midori & Kumi's performance is not to be missed,” Stockroom.com founder Joel Tucker told XBIZ. “It involves bushels of fish and I know they’re going to be used as projectiles.”
He commented also on the recent opening of the company’s retail facility in October, on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. The storefront is a first for the online retailer, who established their Web business in 1988.
“We’re going backwards,” Tucker said, jokingly. “Most companies are trying to figure out how to establish a Web presence and we opened a brick-and-mortar as an afterthought.”
He said that the storefront has been well-received and that the popularity of fetish gear and latex fashion is becoming more mainstream.
This was evidenced by more than 300 partygoers at the Fetish Ball, at least a quarter of which attended in mainstream dress, contrasted against the more serious lifestyle players in their harnesses and rubber. Corsets and hobble skirts were standard for the ladies, and there were several participants in Nazi drag. Gas masks and elaborate rope bindings were popular accessories.
One woman in a red latex hobble skirt and inflatable latex isolation hood was led blindly through the crowd by her master. Throughout the evening, partygoers danced to a Germanic industrial mix with some old school thrown in.
There also were demonstrations of flogging, bull whip play and rope bondage on various pieces of BDSM furniture.
One particularly dramatic demonstration featured a BDSM master named Syrus , who was dressed in a utility kilt, latex gloves and a doctor’s mask. On a raised dais, he wowed the crowd by using needle-tipped pheasant feathers to decorate the bald scalp of a willingly submissive model, creating an elaborate headdress by gently piercing the plumes through the model’s skin.
Asked how he was enjoying the party, Syrus said, “It's great. It brings the community together. It’s a tight knit community and the performers all know each other.”
He said that he often performs at events like the annual Bondage Ball and also at events held at Stockroom’s new store, or at BDSM clubs like Hex and DV8.
On the main stage, the evening was started with a bondage performance involving a beautiful red-headed performer strung up to a steel apparatus with plastic binding wrap, until she appeared to be floating above the stage like a sexy insect trapped in an complicated web.
Syren Latex presented a well-designed fashion show, all in shiny black and white rubber with each model carrying a tattered black parasol and with futuristic airbrushed face makeup. One model strutted the stage in a full latex hood and Edwardian neck ruffle matched to a strapless, striped dress. A latex bondage bolero jacket was paired with a black and white pencil skirt. Another model appeared in a short, white strapless dress with a swing skirt and thigh-high black latex stockings.
The fashion show was capped off with two female models in leather bunny masks, boy’s underwear and Converse hi-tops in a playful boxing match that was bizarre, to say the least.
The big stage event was a stylized piece by Midori and Kumi that had Kumi dressed in traditional Japanese garb, fishing with bamboo poles beneath a huge netted bundle of fish suspended from the steel scaffold.
After Kumi hooked a fish and used it to create some paint-stained impressions on rice paper, Midori appeared in a Japanese wedding kimono, then stripped down to a full latex suit with hood and a vest that sprouted a dozen or more octopus-like tentacles.
After symbolically beating Kumi with a bamboo stick, Midori then used ropes and bamboo to bind the model and suspend her from the steel frame. Midori then used a meat cleaver to hack off Kumi’s hair, which was a wig that fell away to expose her bald scalp. Kumi was then humiliated as Midori smeared her with black paint and sliced off pieces of her costume with the blade.
Finally, Midori took the cleaver and cut open the bundled net of fish, sending a cascade of what looked like tilapia onto the stage. She picked up a few and stroked them gently, holding them up for the audience to see and then threw one into the crowd. Kumi remained hanging as Midori exited stage right.
Also seen at the West Coast Fetish Ball: Evil Angel’s Karen Stagliano and director Jake Malone, fetish furniture designer Downtown Willy (who constructed the stage scaffold and other BDSM apparatus), producer Michael Gross, and Caryl from BDSM resource site ClubXSD.org.
