Walter Van Beirendonck's Paris Show Was a Mask 4 Mask Fantasy for Tops & Bottoms

If 2017 taught us anything, it's that men are pigs and dogs. We've endured news story after new story about sexual assault and misogyny and, yeah, it's exhausting. Sometimes though, you have to take the bad and make it fashion.

Enter gay Belgian design legend Walter Van Beirendonck. For Paris Fashion Week Men's, he unveiled a literal take on the ways of the world that was as fetish-friendly as it was daringly offbeat. There were tops, bottoms, masks, and prints that read "gangbang." There were literal fashion iterations of pigs and dogs. It was fabulously raunchy. For the collection, Beirendonck admitted that he'd drawn inspiration from fetish, recreational sex, and the freedom that represents. As he explained after the show, even the sun and moon had a deeper meaning: they were code for S&M.

Related | Walter van Beirendonck Creates 3D Utopias in Trippy New Fashion Films

As if the collection of PVC shiny clothes and knitted BDSM-friendly garments weren't enough, the entire show was set in what could easily have been both a dungeon and underground bunker while Belgian musicians Orphan Swords played a pulsing soundtrack for clothes already throbbing with innuendo.

Photography: Hunter Abrams