It can often feel like fashion and pornography are in bed together: S&M themes crop up in runway collections; sexuality oozes in photoshoots that follow in the tradition of the inimitable Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton; we frequently use phrases like “shoe porn” and Carine Roitfeld created a need for the phrase “porno chic”; hell, designers even occasionally date porn stars (or play them in movies).
And then there are the times when porn literally makes its way into fashion. Most recently, porn star Stoya was shot by Sean and Seng for Pop Magazine S/S 2013, still seductive in Prada (and, okay, she’s naked for part of it).
As witty and smart as she is gorgeous, Stoya is actively outspoken on social media. She frequents Twitter and Tumblr to express her views on issues like Los Angeles County’s Measure B, which requires porn stars to wear condoms on film, and occasionally pens for (who else?) Vice.
So we reached out to Stoya to chat about her experience with the fashion community and how she views the relationship between porn and fashion.
She had done a few obscure shoots with magazines like Richardson when she encountered photographer duo Sean and Seng shooting porn star James Deen for Arena Homme + (Stoya and Deen are kind of like the Brad and Angie of the porn world). They snapped one photo of Stoya that they shared with the stylist for Pop, and together convinced the magazine to let them put together an editorial around her.
“I think fashion likes things that are exciting and different,” Stoya said of the frequent pornographic themes that crop up in the industry. She cites the heavily-tattooed Rico the Zombie, who starred in Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” video and Amanda Lepore as other examples of fashion embracing the exotic. “With Sean and Seng, they liked all the flexibility that I have,” Stoya said of her own shoot. “I’m not really sure how much you see of that in editorial fashion.”
But to her, fashion and pornography make perfect bedfellows. “There is a fine line [between the two] but art–which is what fashion is, in my opinion, it’s functional art–art and sexual depictions of people and nudity have always been intertwined,” Stoya said.
“It almost seems like fashion is more interested in mining the Marquis de Sade and fetish subcultures than they are in just mining pornography,” she adds, continuing with a small laugh, “probably because if they put a dress that’s meant to be shown on a fashion model on a 5’2 person with DD breasts it doesn’t lay the same.”
Speaking of DDs, Stoya doesn’t really see a difference between nudity in fashion and nudity in pornography, telling us that people who are uncomfortable with female nudity will get upset, “no matter what the context is.”
“I do think that ‘former fashion model’ is more acceptable on a resume than ‘former porn star’,” she admits.
She does believe that fashion models and porn stars have one thing in common: Their careers are based on youth and appearances. “Most of the performers in porn are under 30, most fashion models are under 30, you start pretty young, and it’s a thing that fades,” she said simply. (One thing they don’t have in common? Apparently, pubic hair. Stoya told us she would be “completely un-surprised if there’s more pubic hair removal in the fashion industry than in porno.” Does this mean we can embrace the bush?)
Stoya diplomatically side-steps the question about whether porn stars view fashion as an entree into mainstream media. She’ll admit that there are some porn stars who have quit porn as soon as they’ve had mainstream attention–”Which makes you curious about how much they liked doing porn in the first place,” she adds–but that for most people who love doing porn, like herself and James Deen, fashion shoots just present a chance to do something fun and different. “I have the opportunity to put my brand in front of people that I wouldn’t normally reach, but it’s not a stepping stone,” she said firmly.
“At the end of the day the reason that these people are interested in me is because I do porn,” she concludes with a refreshing sense of self-awareness. “There’s really no other reason that a fashion magazine would put a random 26-year-old who’s barely 5’7 in a fashion editorial.”
