‘I like the dark, it’s friendly,’ Irena Dubrovna, the Serbian vamp, says to her thin-moustached American husband in the 1942 horror flick Cat People. He’s asked about her past and she’s trying to be honest. Spider-lashes and lips in sepia glow, she tells the story. A long time ago the Christian villagers of her hometown had gone mad. King John of Serbia tried to save the town from such witchcraft by killing off the delirious population, but the most wicked of the wicked snuck out into the mountains and became known as these feline morphers. Irena warns her cavalier hubby that she is a descendent of this very tribe and will no doubt shape-shift into a black panther if she ever gets aroused. It’s late. The near-perfect time of day for desire. And when it’s perfect, it’s too late. We see her shadow slink across the walls – ears, tail, claws.
The terrible creature Irena becomes made me, as a viewer, pretty horny. Unlike Mr Right, I wanted to be caught and devoured by the wicked cat more than to be loved by the obedient woman. What a tease the darkness is. How to run a piece of it against the skin? I may have missed the Hollywood take-away of the film. Something about good American girls and fatal foreign women. All I knew was that I wanted to wear Irena’s shadow.
As a Slav, demon-lovers feel quite familiar. After all, darkness has always been one of Eastern Europe’s major exports. Slavic folklore has long been getting the West turned on in dissonant ways: forlorn vampires like Dracula; the sleepless strigoi, troubled spirits risen from their graves; the infamous sadist witch Baba Yaga in her chicken-leg hut; the Rusalka nymphs who lure men into water to murder them; and sexy Soviet spy Xenia Onatopp in the quintessential 007 film GoldenEye (1995), who seduces American agents, wrapping her legs around their waists and crushing them to death with her lethal thighs. But I can’t claim the feline-fatale for my people. The ancient Egyptians worshiped the goddess Sekhmet, who tore apart the pharaoh’s enemies, but could also transform into an adorable kitty cat named Bastet. Cats during this time were even allowed the same mummification and burial honours as people. In one Egyptian ritual, if your cat died you shaved off your eyebrows in mourning. But, as the centuries passed, the revered archetype became too much of a threat. Western Christianity extrapolated the connotation of cats and women to witches and Satanic worship, their supposed wild and perverse libido only adding to today’s sex appeal.
The French fashion designer André Courrèges, the alleged pioneer of the catsuit as à la mode attire, showcased the design in his Space Age collection in 1964, a neck-to-ankle knitted bodycon suit as a futuristic daydream. Though the infamous feline antihero Catwoman is often credited with the fashion statement, when she joined the Batman series in the 1940s, known then as ‘the Cat,’ she was clad in a green knee-length dress. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when actress Julie Newmar appeared in a tight, black, glittering one-piece for the role in the adapted series, that the catsuit emerged as we know it today.
From TV back to prêt-à-porter, recent decades have taken the catsuit beyond theatricalised femininity towards a form of questioning of industrialisation, gender and the environment. Thierry Mugler’s long-standing romance with the structural feminine silhouette has explored the body through alternative anatomical grids, seams mapping erogenous zones, trompe l’oeil tailoring and cut-outs like solar panels. Casey Cadwallader, creative director of Mugler since 2017, coined the term ‘techno-sport lingerie’ to describe an approach that allows the figure-hugging garment to both contain the body and give it freedom of movement. The duality of sleek curves and high-tech angles reflects the confrontation of urbanisation and fast production with more intimate ways of living. It’s no surprise that Mugler’s catsuit has become a beloved second skin to high-energy performers and socially conscious music artists including Dua Lipa, Rihanna, Beyoncé and, of course, Megan Thee Stallion’s body-ody-ody.
Marine Serre, one of the notable young designers bringing eco-consciousness to the forefront of fashion, has based her collections on her ethos of circularity, a method that implements recycling and regenerating already existing resources to reduce waste and integrate end-of-life merchandise. Her now-iconic revamp of the catsuit, a full-body garment made of recycled black polyester blend with a constellation of off-white crescent moons from neck to ankle, gives the femme fatale a uniform for the apocalypse, where she walks in mourning of the human-made destruction of nature with the Amazonian gait of resistance. Serre’s Catwoman is no longer a villain, but an activist, reuniting with her folkloric duality of half-beast, half-beloved, to not only cherish the earth’s poetry but fight for it. As the subversive French writer Hélène Cixous proclaimed in The Book of Promethea (1983), ‘I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life.’
Serre’s catsuit is a part of the leitmotif of her collections at large, including skin-tight cosmic wear, long-sleeved tops, leggings and bike-style shorts, all sported by women and men alike – a dress code that has prompted many (myself included) to double-take their street crushes, trying to pinpoint if they were a girl, boy or the enby of their dreams. The seemingly high-gendered wear, showing off a person’s anatomical topography to a tee, has a paradoxical post-gender effect. Serre’s print and colour scheme often pairs skin tones with alien hues, exaggerating the body’s ambiguity as either sexualised, sexless or non-human.
Before the catsuit became a garment, however, it was a posture and mise en scène. Early BDSM and kink publications like the 1920s London Life presented women in skin-tight latex ensembles with legs sharply planted in stiletto claws, hips slanted and a long leather whip held at the side like a tail. Illustrations of this reoccurring dom mid-flogging even gave her the type of hissing arched back that I’m not sure a human morphology would allow. S&M scenes between women often portrayed an intertwined struggle reminiscent of a cat fight. Early to mid-century pin-up magazines like Wink, Titter, Whisper, Eyeful and Flirt would continue with the physical nomenclature of the feline-fatale. The body: poised to pounce, waist cinched, long nails, spiked heels. But the face: doe-eyed, with a daddy’s-girl grin, to assure the predominantly male viewer that she’s harmless. A pussycat. A good kitty. A sex kitten.
These glossy kink personas and sadomaso sketches often become the reductive eye-candy of BDSM history, esteeming kink garments for their shock value and appeasement of the male gaze. Reframing these images within the phenomenology of kink practice reveals the catsuit as a much more complex accessory in a spiritual experience of the self. In her paramount article, ‘The Experience of the Skin in Early Object Relations’ in the 1968 International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Polish psychoanalyst Esther Bick described the primary experience of identity as the formation of a ‘psychic skin’ to contain the sensation of individuality. If this process of auto-coherence and differentiation between the self and other is disrupted, the baby in turn creates ‘a second skin’ to prevent total disintegration, by contouring itself with the surfaces of outside objects. This leads to later difficulty in self-perception, and in turn self-protection. Though nowadays the term ‘second skin’ is seen as a form of extreme comfort, Bick’s discernment of the primary process of identity points to the importance of the psychic skin to serve as a form of awareness and agency, rather than an act of layering. Granted, Bick may curse my personal kink trousseau for synthesising her research in the light of kink apparel, but I’ll take the risk. I have been cursed before.
It’s common that latex- or leather-catsuit wearers describe the sensation of their cherished garment as such a second skin. This description, however, is more akin to Bick’s sheathing of awareness, a halo of sensation between our body and the touch given or received, than to Lana Del Rey’s ‘you fit me better than my favourite sweater.’ There might even be a strong parallel between Bick’s ‘psychic catsuit’ and medical compression garments that serve to decrease swelling, lower the risk of thrombosis in the case of blood clots, and accelerate the wound-healing process. If we consider the aspect of chosen confinement as a simultaneous feature of well-being, then that lubed-up latex catsuit in the midst of a kinky play session can serve as a restorative practice in a similar vein to prescription bodycon. In fact, BDSM and fetishism, listed as mental disorders by the International Classification of Diseases until 2013, and systematically diagnosed as a pathology by medical institutions, have in recent years been regarded as potential therapeutic pathways, such as in Alison Robinson’s work on ‘gestalt through kink encounter,’ or the shamanic practitioner James Lawer’s use of BDSM as shamanic ritual.
The shadow is no longer what we seek to shed, but what we put on. The earlier implication that women were possessed or inhabited by this cat-like spirit – and that it was this very darkness that wore their body – was not so much being refuted by the arrival of the catsuit, but embraced. And so, at the origin of the catsuit is the ‘womansuit,’ or a cat wearing femaleness. In this fetish space, the doomed Irena, trapped in her cat-hex, and the vilified Catwoman are revelling in their own malediction. And it is their satisfaction, not their perversion, that both terrifies and seduces. As adrienne maree brown reminds us in her book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019), ‘Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for.’ What’s not to say that the skintight, lustrous garb is not also a uniform of the dissident?
Inside the catsuit it’s hard to separate the woman from the cat. These entities exist through their relationship to each other, and, in turn, through the relationship between the dark past and the blinding future. The catsuit is therefore a relational ontology between the folk relic and the forthcoming avatar. It is only in donning the catsuit that the woman attains a holistic nudity, all clothed and more naked than ever. This fusion between material and being is echoed in psychologists Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky’s notion of ‘enclothed cognition,’ the methodic influence of certain articles of clothing on the psychological processes of the person wearing them. The encounter with an obscurity within and without takes place, as the catsuit sucks up the mortal form.
In the dark, the body is reduced to a measure of darkness. As the French poet Robert Desnos proclaims in his seminal poem ‘I Have Dreamed of You So Much,’ such incessant dreaming erases the real woman from reality. He has spent too many nights holding her shadow in his arms, so that if the real woman were to come, his arms would no longer be able to fit around her physical form. He continues dreaming, arms pressed into the chest. The woman comes and goes, elsewhere. In Aesop’s fiftieth fable, a man loves his cat so much he prays to Aphrodite that she be turned into a woman. The goddess obliges and transforms his beloved pet into a beautiful young woman. The man instantly proposes, and the woman is his for a lifetime. But the question lingers, is he marrying a woman with the soul of a cat, or a cat with the soul of a woman? Perhaps the true marriage in the fable is between the cat and the woman, and the catsuit, our new bridal gown. Sorry amore.
It’s not just the suit but the revered cat of old-times-past that is making a full circle. In a Forbes article dissecting our obsession with cats on social media, Jordan Shapiro writes, ‘if you want to be an internet superstar, you’ll need a cat.’ A cat page on Instagram, for example, can make you some serious bank, not to mention a viral celebrity. I have a cat, but no knack for the limelight, and besides, I prefer to make a Faustian vow than one of fame and fortune. Had Forbes given me a word count, I would have written: if you want to hold on to your soul, you’ll need a catsuit.