John Sutcliffe and AtomAge: Leather, Rubber, and British Fetish Print

John Sutcliffe, who died in 1987, was a British fetish-clothing designer and the publisher of AtomAge. In the 1970s the magazine was treated as an underground bible of leather, rubber, and vinyl wear, and as one of the few direct records of Britain’s S/M scene. His work runs from the isolated rubber fashion of the postwar years, through catsuits on television, to punk carrying fetish clothes into the street. The pictures also let that scene see itself.

His fixation on leather in the 1950s ended his marriage and brought a mental-illness diagnosis. Treatment did not “cure” him. He built a business instead. In 1957 he registered a company whose stated product was weatherproofs for women riding pillion on motorcycles. That was the respectable line. What he sold was motorcycle-adjacent fetish clothing for women on the back seat and for men who wanted the look. The garment was a second skin, not rain gear.

Mainstream pictures wore the cut. The leather catsuits associated with Emma Peel in The Avengers were influenced by his designs. The leather catsuit Marianne Faithfull wore in the 1968 film The Girl on a Motorcycle was one he made. Spy television and counterculture cinema used dungeon-adjacent tailoring and often left his name off the credit.

The first AtomAge clothing catalogue appeared in 1965. It became a magazine in 1972 and ran until 1980, mixing fashion, fantasy photography, and scene documentation for people who actually lived in rubber and leather. The pages helped inspire SEX, the King’s Road shop Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ran from 1974 to 1976, which dressed early punk in fetish codes. That is one of the clearer paths from BDSM aesthetics into youth culture.

Sutcliffe was also a materials tinkerer. He developed a needle that could sew vinyl, a way of bonding thin cotton-type fabric to latex so the rubber could be stitched, and a sewing machine built for leather. When he asked Singer to manufacture that leather machine, his friend Robert Henley recalled that Singer was so horrified they called the police. Technical steps in fetish clothing kept running into moral panic from industrial partners. Those changes are why later catsuits and clubwear could be sewn garments rather than pieces that only held together with glue.

The print side stayed fragile. In 1982 he published Jim Dickson’s novel The Story of Gerda, about bondage and fetishism. A copy reached the police. To avoid prosecution he agreed to destroy the stock and the AtomAge printing plates. One novel and one complaint were enough to wipe years of plates. Collectors still treat that as an erasure.

The pictures came back in print. In 2010 FUEL published Dressing for Pleasure in Rubber, Vinyl and Leather: The Best of Atomage 1972–1980, by Jonny Trunk with Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell, putting the imagery and reader letters in front of a later fetish audience. In 2023 Sutcliffe entered the Leather Hall of Fame. Designer-manufacturer, magazine publisher, and materials inventor sat in one person: clothes for television and a motorcycle film, a visual push toward punk’s SEX shop, and a record of British S/M dress. The cost was a 1950s marriage that pathologized the desire, and plates that were destroyed. The wearers and the readers were adults.