Decades before latex brands and online dungeon shops, France already had a mail-order house selling erotic clothing. Yva Richard opened a few weeks before the First World War. Nativa Richard ran it with her husband. By the late 1920s it was a successful catalogue business. Specialized erotic clothes already had paying customers.
One of the house’s best-known pieces was a studded steel cone bra with a chastity belt and a plumed headdress. The costume treats the body as armored display: metal against feathers. Later BDSM fashion sits on that line. Chastity is made into a garment, the breasts are shaped in steel, and the silhouette is theater about control.
The main competitor was Diana Slip. The two houses show interwar France as a center of haute couture and, at the same time, a mail-order hub for adult specialty clothing. For fetish history, Yva Richard is a fixed point: opened on the eve of the war, booming by catalogue in the late 1920s, known for extreme steel and chastity pieces, with Diana Slip as the rival. Makers who sell metal lingerie and theatrical chastity now are on a path Yva Richard was already mailing to customers about a century ago.
