300(ish) Words on High-Fashion Condoms
Magnum. Trojan. Ribbed for his pleasure. The maximalist copy of the condom aisle confused and embarrassed me, and in an attempt to vanquish that insecurity, I gestured wildly to my friend on the porch of the party, lampooning brand names and marketing tropes in the performatively macho voices of AM sports talk shows. Bravado yielded to curiosity when she pulled a condom from her bag. It was charming and refreshingly free from gender signifiers. I thrilled to seafoam-green foil with faint blue squiggles, minimal text, and the name of an auteur fashion designer. It looked like a ticket or a prize. It was Proper Attire.
Long before churchy campaigns to “make consent sexy,” Planned Parenthood embarked on a mission to, perhaps, make protection stylish and aspirational. Press releases from the 2014 launch inspire a flash of second-hand embarrassment at PP’s attempt to frame condoms as fashion accessories meant to empower women. Mara Hoffman’s tropical prints and indigenous motifs sent through a Tulum filter could be yours on a dress for a few hundred dollars or for free at the clinic on foil packets dropped by the handful into a brown lunch bag.
My favorites are from Jeremy Scott, idiosyncratically garish and generic with shocks of neon and abstract animal print. Is it ironic? This question was posed in a New Yorker profile on Scott, published many years since I’d come into possession of his prophylactic cult cargo. Seeing him posed in a rhinestone-studded Tweedy Bird hoodie retrieved a phrase from elementary school: Jeremy Scott is gifted and talented. Other Proper Attire designers seemed to sidestep sex altogether, with washed-out florals or demure gingham, but his designs were playful and direct. The mall-after-dark aesthetic drunkenly insists on its own allure and kicks open a trapdoor to an unfettered world, one in which you might want to come prepared to fuck in a roller rink. Wayne Koestenbaum: “People who don’t lust after me make me ill”.
Since learning about Proper Attire and avidly collecting its strange designs in preparation for some young adult odyssey of daring, de-corporatized sex, my need for and use of high-fashion condoms has stalled out. I’m mostly single, I have an IUD, and a corollary to Koestenbaum’s declaration about desire has ossified into a firm dictum. I’m only interested in sleeping with people who fascinate me, who make me feel like I want to mail them everything I own. Major players only. This narrows the pool of candidates considerably. If my status as a benchwarmer surrounded by deadstock designer condoms makes me a kind of contemporary Miss Havisham, I’ll take it. Wherever I’m going, I’m getting there in style.
Katy Aus is a bot who lives in Chicago.
