The curious mainstream theatrical dance spectacular based on an extravagant adult movie from the artist best known as Buttman.
Hardcore porn is not a genre noted for its mainstream spin-off potential; much less BDSM-flavoured fetish porn. Yet that’s exactly what happened in 2004, when John Stagliano took his kink extravaganza The Fashionistas to the Las Vegas stage, not as an erotic revue but as a wildly ambitious mainstream dance spectacular, one that ultimately failed to find an audience either with adult movie fans or regular theatre-goers, but which stands as one of the most interesting failures in theatre history.
Director John Stagliano is best known as Buttman – the king of Gonzo and the man who – if not responsible for inventing the genre – defined its style with both his own productions and the work of fellow directors who worked as part of his Evil Angel stable. Yet he also shot several acclaimed narrative features, most notably Facedance and Buda. These epic 1990s films, shot between the likes of Buttman’s Big Tit Adventure and Buttman and Rocco’s Brazilian Butt Fest, felt like someone using his financial success to indulge in ‘proper’ filmmaking – not so much vanity projects as the sort of thing that he perhaps really wanted to do, but which needed to to be financed by his less creative work. It was all leading towards what was – and is – his most ambitious work.
2002 production The Fashionistas remains one of the most ambitious hardcore movies ever shot, with the original release also setting new standards for DVD presentation. The package put most mainstream ‘collectors editions’ of the time to shame, coming on no less than four discs – three DVDs (two for the four-and-a-half hour film itself, one for a feature-length documentary) and one soundtrack CD.
The film tells the story of Italian fashion designer Antonio – played by regular collaborator Rocco Siffredi – who is in America to create a new line of fetish-influenced clothes. He begins a collaboration with Fashionista, a fetish clothing company run by pushy designer Helena (Taylor St. Claire), but is intrigued by hidden ‘easter egg’ footage he finds on her promotional DVD, showing intense BDSM rituals. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Helena’s assistant Jessie (Belladonna) is not the shy, retiring type she at first seems, and a battle commences for Antonio’s affections – and perhaps his soul – as he is drawn further and further into the BDSM underground.
Beautifully shot on 35mm film, the film positively drips with decadent opulence. The fetish costuming is impressive, and the BDSM scenes reach a level of intensity rarely seen in mainstream adult movie-making since the 1970s. This is the most effective marriage of straight porn, SM and cinematic production values since Radley Metzger‘s The Image.
Unsurprisingly, The Fashionistas swept the board at the 2003 AVN Awards and became something of a gold standard for ambitious, uncompromising porn during the final days of narrative adult feature films – in 2002, internet porn was still small potatoes as far as producers were concerned but the writing was already on the wall. At the time though, it was still possible for an expensive release like this to be a big hit – enough to justify Stagliano’s faith in what was clearly a passion project. He followed up in 2006 with a pair of sequels: the rather awkwardly titled Fashionistas Safado: the Challenge and Fashionistas Safado: Berlin, neither of which matched the original. The story that propelled the original film is lost here amidst lengthy orgies and extended sex scenes that make it difficult to follow the characters’ motivations, emotional traumas and the plot of a rival ‘underground’ competitor to the Fashionistas fetish label emerging. Despite returning stars Rocco Siffredi, Manuel Ferrara and Belladonna being joined by Sasha Grey and Jenna Haze, the films – both over four hours in length – feel like half-hearted attempts to drag the concept out.
The first of the sequels is made to feel longer by around 20 minutes of footage from Stagliano’s other Fashionistas off-shoot crammed into the film for no good reason. By the time the sequels were shot, his Las Vegas show based on the first film had been running for a couple of years and the inclusion of a video recording from the show in the film perhaps hints at just how well things were going.
A little back story here: before he became one of the biggest names in porn, even before he worked as a Chippendales dancer at the end of the 1970s, Stagliano had trained in modern dance and jazz dance. While he claims that he was attracted to these classes because of how many women they attracted, it’s obvious that a love of the form was at least instilled in him from the experience. Dance is a theme that runs through his narrative films and so no one should’ve been surprised when he decided to take his biggest success – at least critically – and push it into mainstream theatre.
Well, actually, it seems a very surprising move. Even more so when you realise that the show, while vaguely erotic, didn’t feature the sort of topless dancers that could be found in other Vegas glamour shows. It had a narrative that was expressed through dance, backed with then-current industrial and nu-metal music from the likes of Tool and Evanescence. It was part theatre, part ballet and part fetish club performance, performed in a casino theatre. Just who this was aimed at is hard to fathom. Regular theatregoers were probably not going to be drawn into a show based on a heavily kinky porn movie and adult movie audiences – at least the sort who were vacationing in Las Vegas – were probably not going to sit through a dramatic study in fashion and dance that didn’t even offer up any nudity. You have to admire Stagliano’s ambition but this was probably the wrong show in the wrong place.
Interestingly, the Vegas critics were generally complimentary about the show but that didn’t help bring in an audience. Most nights played in a half-empty venue. Stagliano kept it going for four years, losing a fortune in the process. In 2008, he put together a special Fashionistas performance for the AVN Awards that ended with FBI officers arresting the sexually liberated dancers in a piece that explored the moral conflicts of America. It was a case of art predicting reality, as April that year saw Stagliano arrested on obscenity charges. His focus now elsewhere, he finally pulled the plug on the show that he had admitted was a labour of love.
Stagliano never returned to the Fashionistas stage show. As far as I can tell, the video recording of the show was never commercially released, though I’d be happy to be proven wrong on that. The whole thing certainly seems to have slipped into obscurity, seen as a mad folly and an example of a pornographer overstepping his bounds instead of staying in the porno lane where he belonged. Yet I can’t help but feel that there perhaps is a place for this show. Vegas is probably not it, but if fetish club floorshows and burlesque performers can still find an audience, then surely there is room for this. Yes, it’s wildly ambitious and perhaps overly expensive – but it seems a shame that the show has been cast aside completely. It was just in the wrong place, pitched at the wrong audience.
Perhaps Stagliano is done with the whole Fashionistas idea – he made Fashionistas Lost in 2020 but by all accounts, it is a pale imitation of the earlier films. He’s 72 now and maybe just wants an easy life. Still, I admire the ambition that brought this show to life and the belief that it was possible to take an adult movie narrative and bring it to the mainstream.
DAVID FLINT
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