The horror of the woman flower: Fetish and florals in the work of Richard Quinn

Abstract

Since the start of his career, British fashion designer Richard Quinn has juxtaposed highly fetishistic imagery with bourgeois floral prints in his runway presentations. The interplay of Quinn’s masks, latex and whips with his choice of bold and bright florals is informed by the various and complex symbolic associations with flowers, which communicates both a delicate femininity and sexual danger. At the core of this is the idea of the hybridized image of the woman-as-flower, who embodies a beguiling combination of exaggerated feminine beauty and uncanny horror. To contextualize why Quinn’s fetish-chic fashion is so impactful, this article explores the fashionable representations of the ‘woman-flower’ through history and how Quinn co-opts imagery of bondage, discipline and sado-masochism (BDSM), and fetishwear to evoke the complex associations found within floral symbolism, its links to eroticism and sexuality, and how this is enacted on the runway within the discourses of plant horror and the monstrous-feminine.