ITS LIZARD FASHION MONDAY

ITS LIZARD FASHION MONDAY

The Leather and Lace Expanded Hanky Code, distributed by Leather and Lace (a women's club founded in 1983) and preserved by the Leather History Museum.

Like most women's lists of the era, Leather & Lace's list is based off the Samois code: a half dozen colors make its origins unmistakable. What makes this list so significant is how long it is - and how (unlike the Eagle's list ten years earlier) many of its colors still feature in the online master lists you can find online today.

The influence is, honestly, outsized, and leaves me with more questions than answers. Was there a third-party list that Leather & Lace drew off of? Or did the online master lists drawing heavily on L&L? Either way, this list feels like it casts a long historic shadow.

Dark pink (tit torture), fuschia (spanking), leopard (inked), charcoal (latex), and gold (threesomes) are all listed with their now-standard meanings. Dark pink is especially significant to me, because its coexistence with pink (breast fondling) complicates my theory that it evolved out of the Samois code.

Light green (humiliation/verbal abuse) is also listed with what I understand to be its modern meaning, which is impressive because it isn't included in most big online lists. I have no idea where you'd find a light green bandana, but if you want to flag (or be made to flag, you disgusting little freaks) for your degradation kink in public, you know what to shop for.

Dark red (dildos), listed here for the first time, fills an obvious hole (ahem) in the Samois list. At some point dark red shifted in meaning to double fisting and dildos were assigned to pink, but it apparently wasn't until after 1983.

As is often the case in early lists, L&L includes a number of flags that didn't take off. Silver lamé (psychological dominance), black lace (branding), gold lamé (cutting), enema nozzles (take a wild guess), chamois (bikers), black and white stripes (in an open relationship), saran wrap (voyeur/exhibitionist), and teddy bears (cuddles) are all unique to Leather & Lace, but it's interesting that several of those colors have since been repurposed and now have different meanings attached. Again, no idea if L&L introduced these themselves or adapted them from an already existing list.

While we're talking hapax legomena, red and black stripes makes Leather and Lace the first list I've seen to include something repeatedly reinvented by women, never codified (I flag it with red paisley on black), and very hot: vampire kink. Stay winning, ladies!

it is so wild to me the fashions that are called “emo” today. especially given the fact that probably 80-90% of it is actually scene, not emo. this would have started full on wars 15 years ago

What’s better than a vampire? What’s better than a horse. A Vampire Horse, of course. I made this comic a few months ago.

WE HAD WAYNE BRADY DOING KARAOKE IMPROV ON MAKE SOME NOISE AND IT WAS ✨MAGICAL ✨