In 2002 John Stagliano directed The Fashionistas for Evil Angel Productions, shot on 35 mm as a high-spec production. The fetish and S&M fashion feature had a budget of about $500,000 and a runtime of more than four and a half hours. It sold, hard: more than 100,000 copies in the first month. In 2003 it set a record for AVN Award nominations for a single title, twenty-two. The film is also Manuel Ferrara’s American debut. It is a flagship Evil Angel title, and two sequels followed: Fashionistas Safado: The Challenge and Fashionistas Safado: Berlin. Rocco Siffredi, Belladonna, and Ferrara came back. Katsuni and Nacho Vidal joined the later casts.
The story is set in Los Angeles’s Fashion District, around an up-and-coming group of fetish fashion designers. Helena, played by Taylor St. Claire, leads them and wants a deal with the Italian designer Antonio, played by Rocco Siffredi, recently divorced and trailed by highly publicized affair rumors. To get his attention, the Fashionistas crash his fashion show. Helena wants him to believe she is the creative force behind the group. The real creative engine is her assistant Jesse, played by Belladonna. Ambition, the fight over credit, and erotic rivalry tangle together, and Jesse is pulled into a triangle with Helena and Antonio.
The title did not stay on screen. A theatrical dance production, The Fashionistas Live Show, ran from 12 October 2004 to 28 February 2008 at the Krave nightclub inside The Aladdin in Las Vegas, and won the AVN Special Achievement Award in 2006. The 35 mm shoot, the fashion-show plot, the names Belladonna, Siffredi, and Ferrara, the Safado sequels, and the long Vegas run show bondage and fetish aesthetics sold as both high-spec porn and nightlife. Unlike a disposable short, the story treats fetish fashion as an industry and an identity: designers, a runway crash, stolen creative credit, and an Italian S/M-couture buyer who is himself a sexual prize. The clothes work as character and commerce. They are not sitting there only as wardrobe for the sex scenes. In the early 2000s, fetish-fashion porn could be pushed to event-title status and then leave the DVD rack for a nightclub stage.
