It's What's Behind

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Foofaraw

How fashionable the fleshy foofaraw
they’re making about fetishes and bondage
and sadomasochism they adore,
the denizens who dwell in demi mondage.
I can’t keep up with all the possibilities
of partner, posture, missionary and oral,
but sick at heart of being ill at ease,
I’ll write a poem, looking for no moral,
and make a daring detour into naughty
to look around, fed up with being square,
and, losing twenty years becoming forty,
find fun from foofaraws that help me dare.

Guy Trebay writes in The New York Times, October 31, 2000 (“A Detour Into Naughty for Last Season’s Nice Girls”) reviews the fashion scene and asks whether naughty fashion needs a spanking:
But behind all the foofaraw were darker and not unfamiliar strains of influence, specifically in clothes that made frank allusion to bondage, fetishes and sadomasochism. This was by no means fashion's first excursion into the territory. Remember Gianni Versace's bondage collection of the early 1990's? The corsets and cone bras Jean Paul Gaultier designed for Madonna's "Blond Ambition" tour? The fashion photographer Helmut Newton's protracted romance with the louche iconography of the alleys? What made this season's kinky excursion different was the diffuse way fetish wear turned up on the runways, in collections from designers of all stripes….."We're coming out of a period of ladylike, bourgeois Stepford wife clothes," Mr. Bartlett said. "There is a reaction to that." In putting together his spring collection, Mr. Bartlett explained, he had a desire to be "a little more primitive." His collection was about the tension between "restraint and the way desire manages to find sensual expression," he said. "I was working from the idea that kink and role-playing can be so expressive of sexuality, and sensuality."