Fashion has long taken inspiration from the sexual underground, but this season, designers across the board seemed to have been more swept up than usual in libidinal energy. At Milan Fashion Week, Glenn Martens’ turned his Diesel swan song into an orgy performed by (LA)HORDE, who aggressively made out among the audience to a soundtrack of escalating moans. Similarly, at both Prada and Tom Ford, the sound of a woman reaching climax replaced the usual runway soundtrack. Meanwhile, at Maximilian Davis’ Ferragamo, 1940s silhouettes were reimagined in fetishistic latex rubber.

In London, the presence of the adult entertainment industry was unavoidable: from OnlyFans backing Natasha Zinko’s show, which featured glamour model legend Katie Price on the runway and prominent NSFW creators in the audience, to cult fetishwear brand R&M Leathers’ PornHub collab, which cast prominent porn stars like Elly Clutch to model. But why, exactly, is sex so appealing to designers this SS27 season? 

This slew of sexually turbocharged shows coincides with the UK publication of Patricia Nilsson’s Guilty Pleasure, a non-fiction book which argues that porn built the internet as we know it. “[Porn websites] were really the first ones that started figuring out how to monetise huge amounts of attention,” as Nilsson explained to Dazed earlier this week. 

The porn world knows that attention is the ultimate currency and quickly understood how to harness new technology to capture it. With every other sector now required to be on social media as part of their basic marketing package – and, thus, locked into a kind of sub/dom relationship with the algorithm – this logic has spread far beyond the adult film industry. Perhaps this is why fashion this season has been playing with the iconography of sex and partnering with NSFW platforms: to reflect an increasingly porn-brained culture in which social media algorithms exploit the same mechanisms of attraction and gratification that the adult industry helped pioneer.

But, let’s be real: brands may be referencing porn (and sex more broadly) as a meta-commentary on our online existence, but it’s also about tapping into the attention economy themselves. There’s little else that captures our attention, titillates audiences or generates column inches quite as effectively. If you’re creating a collection and curating a front row that will largely – besides a small room of industry insiders who see it IRL – be viewed through a phone screen, it makes sense to recruit the internet’s most visible stars, many of whom now work across porn and OnlyFans. The exchange cuts both ways: for platforms like Pornhub and OnlyFans, fashion offers cultural legitimacy at a time when both companies are facing scrutiny over how their businesses operate. (Aylo, Pornhub’s operator, has recently faced scrutiny over child sexual abuse and non-consensual material circulating on its sites, while OnlyFans has been criticised over allegations of exploitative third-party management).

For porn historian Noelle Perdue, brands’ greater willingness to align themselves with the adult entertainment industry is a reaction to the increasingly atomised way we consume culture – one in which shared touchpoints and universally recognised figures are becoming more scarce. “The people influencing culture and holding those traditional celebrity roles are more often coming out of platforms like TikTok and YouTube. Without the unionised paycheque of a traditional Hollywood celebrity, or the touring opportunities of a successful musician, many of these platform influencers have built audiences on sites like OnlyFans.” 

It’s worth keeping in mind that, in this landscape, the division between SFW and NSFW creators is increasingly blurred: not just because of the platforms they post on, or the content they produce, but because of the parasocial relationships fans develop with them, many of which are based on sexual attraction. “Practically speaking, there is little difference between someone who identifies as an Instagram influencer with a successful OnlyFans account, like, for example, Levi Coralynn, and someone who identifies as an OF creator with a successful Tiktok/Instagram presence, like Ari Kytsya,” she adds. “Both hold tremendous influence, both hold cultural capital at equal or higher levels than a huge percentage of ‘traditional’ celebrities.”

Being optimistic, perhaps what we’re seeing is porn performers – and sex workers more broadly – finally getting their due in the mainstream, not necessarily because of brand goodwill, but because their cultural influence has become impossible to ignore. “Porn influences pop culture way more than people like to admit. Sex workers are always experimenting with how we look, how we present ourselves, social media, beauty, technology,” says Clutch, who started out her career in modelling before crossing into porn. “Then a few years later you’ll see the same things in fashion or music or advertising and it’s like, ‘wait a minute, I’ve seen this somewhere before’.”

Sex workers are often the blueprint when it comes to trends – something the SW-led magazine Petit Mort acknowledged in a series of archetypes riffing off Demna’s Gucci last season. It’s also worth noting that, as online innovators, sex workers are uniquely well-placed to navigate the ever-changing digital landscape, both by instinct and necessity, given the constant threat of deplatforming and censorship. However, sex workers are often belittled and have their agency erased by the anti-sex work narratives that dominate mainstream discourse. Fashion borrowing their aesthetics or cultural capital doesn’t necessarily change those conditions – and visibility is not the same thing as power.

Clutch hopes that, in future, fashion and culture will acknowledge the sex workers who are defining culture on and offline. “I’m just really happy that this season it seems like fashion is actually letting us into the room,” Clutch adds. “I hope it keeps going. I would love to see more porn stars and sex workers consulting when big fashion houses borrow from our aesthetics. If you’re going to be inspired by us, ask us! We have opinions. Lots of them.”

There’s a further connection here, with both fashion and porn occupying a liminal space between reality and fantasy. Fashion week features real clothes, yes, but today this feels almost secondary to the spectacle: how a collection makes you feel, the vision a designer is trying to communicate and, most importantly, how it all translates to social media. Clothes themselves are about so much more than their physicality – they are a visual language of symbols that reflect culture and taste, and a way of projecting identity. 

Porn, too, combines the physical (unsimulated sex) with fantasy – beautiful faces and bodies, and scenarios tailored to specific fetishes. Often, the difficulty comes when we forget that porn is entertainment, not real life – the same could be said for fashion, whose punishing beauty standards have haunted generations. Both ask us to project ourselves into fantasies: to imagine different bodies and ways of being.

For Perdue, it’s this sense of play, and the melding of the real with fantasy, that has drawn fashion towards sex. After all, when AI might kill us all, it’s worth having fun with sex and gender – and enjoying the titillation of sexual experimentation. “I think –  and this might be controversial –  people like sex, and people want to be sexy,” she explains. “Even more controversially, I think playing with gender and sexuality can be fun. I understand that things are harrowing right now, and that sex and gender roles do legitimately come with very high stakes emotionally, physically and politically. But sex, and being sexy, can feel good. We can explore it creatively, we can choose to put things on and take them off; gender roles and clothing alike.”