Cake-penetrating latex socks, ankles bound with cable tie, and water-drenched PVC platforms all become subjects of the lens of Eloise Parry for the latest series from underground title Sang Bleu. The 10-year-old tome started as the tattoo-themed editorial project of creative director Maxime Büchi, who continues to probe its surrounding subcultures alongside a career as a tattooist and art director for Mugler, Alexander McQueen and Rick Owens. Now operating as a multidisciplinary project with a fashion line under its umbrella, the title explores sexuality and fetish beyond the whips-and-chains image perpetuated by modern media and 'mom porn' books such as 50 Shades of Grey. In the lead up to a brand new issue announced exclusively on NOWNESS, the tattoo renegade talks Tumblr, porn and forging the next chapter for the London-based project.   

Going back to the start, how would you define Sang Bleu's original impetus?
Maxime Büchi: Fetish and BDSM is something I’ve always had an interest for and I just applied the same approach that I had applied to tattooing and the other elements of Sang Bleu to fetish. Fetish and BDSM have nothing to do with wearing leather hats for instance, it’s only about how far you want to experiment and get more sophisticated in your sexuality. It’s just a somewhat unfortunate word but in reality everyone does BDSM to some extent, or has some sort of fetishistic approach, sexual or not.

What do you think of the resurgence of erotic publishing in the last year?
MB: I think it’s mostly a sign of desperation; sex is the last thing you’ll be sure people will always have an interest for. One thing that’s really interesting is Tumblr. For me it’s a magazine, it’s just not on paper. It is what fanzines were in the 1980s and that’s where you can see a lot of very interesting things being said and shown about sexuality. You have to respect the intrinsic qualities and restrictions of any media. That’s what worked so well for Butt magazine; it’s genius. The founders are some of the most important people in publishing in the 21st century because they understood so well what a print magazine is. Nobody is interested to look at printed photos of pornography when you’ve gone to moving image; we want an illusion of reality. Once you know what film gives in terms of inspiration, arousal, whatever, you cannot look at a photo and think that it’s cool: it’s counter-evolutionary.

How have you seen the reception of issues surrounding sex evolve since the magazine’s inception?
MB: Because I’m a tattooist now I feel that the presence of tattoo in Sang Bleu now has evolved a lot as well. On my personal level but also on the evolution of Sang Bleu, fetish is the last thing I feel we haven’t really explored to an extend, I feel we’ve only scratched the surface of that aspect and for me all of the rest now when you look at fashion or tattooing or fine arts in the past 10 years you’ve seen all kinds of new approaches, publications and people appropriating and talking about these things. But I feel with sex and fetish, nobody has come up with a really interesting approach. Or something that is not completely literal or completely stereotypical and not completely geeky and incapable of opening this to people who are not in the scene, because just as for everything else I’m kind of in between scenes. I just feel it’s the right moment and one subject that we’ve only stayed at the surface of whereas other ones we’ve gone pretty much as deep as we wanted to go.

For Gait, Sang Bleu's YouTube-inspired short, head here.