Charles Guyette (August 14, 1902 – June 1976) was a pioneer of American fetish style: the first person in the United States to produce and distribute fetish art at scale, and the mail-order predecessor of Irving Klaw. Later nicknamed the "G-String King," he is best remembered for his bizarre—meaning fetish—photographs, some of which carried open sadomasochistic content. For BDSM and fetish-fashion readers, Guyette is the underground supply chain that made custom boots, opera gloves, vintage corsets, and G-strings available when polite commerce would not touch them—and the first major U.S. figure to pay for that work with a federal prison term.
Burlesque costumer, mail-order dealer, and pin-up supplier
Guyette worked as an inventive burlesque costumer and dealer in theatrical accessories. His stock and custom lines included vintage corsets, opera gloves, bespoke fetish boots, and, most famously, G-strings. Employed by National Police Gazette editor Edythe Farrell, he later supplied costumes, high-heel shoes and boots, and occasionally photographs to publisher Robert Harrison, whose pin-up magazines—Wink, Titter, Beauty Parade, Whisper, and Eyeful—fed mid-century American soft-core appetite. That dual role matters: he was not only a photographer of fetish tableaux; he was the costumer who put the gear on bodies and into magazine spreads, linking stage burlesque, newsstand pin-up, and private mail-order kink long before a public "BDSM scene" had a name.
He was also important in early fetish community social circles and in the careers of John Willie and Irving Klaw. The network around Guyette is one reason later histories treat him as a hinge figure rather than a footnote: people who built the next wave of American fetish publishing and illustration learned what was possible—and what was dangerous—from his market and his legal fate.
1935 federal prison, aliases, and the West 45th Street shop
In 1935 Guyette went to federal prison, becoming the first widely cited martyr of American fetish art history. Afterward he operated under a series of aliases and owned a costume shop on West 45th Street in New York City. The alias period is pure survival craft: keep shipping boots, gloves, and G-strings while staying one step ahead of prosecutors who treated fetish commerce as moral crime rather than costume retail. Largely uncredited in his lifetime, he still influenced key innovators of fetish art and publishing, including Irving Klaw, John Willie, Eric Stanton, and Leonard Burtman. Their better-known brands and comics sit on a foundation Guyette laid when mail-order fetish was still something you could be locked up for. Without his early supply chain—corsetry, custom footwear, G-strings, and SM-flavored stills—the later mid-century "bizarre" underground would have had far less inventory and far fewer photographic templates to steal, improve, and brand.
Book tribute, Professor Marston film, and further reading
He is the subject of the book tribute Charles Guyette: Godfather of American Fetish Art (Cream Paper Edition) by Richard Pérez Seves (New York: FetHistory, 2019, ISBN 978-1077679689). He also appears in the independent biopic on Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston: Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women features Guyette as the costumer for Wonder Woman’s real-life inspiration, Olive Byrne, played by actor JJ Feild. That casting is a mainstream acknowledgment that Marston’s bondage-tinged iconography and Guyette’s fetish costume trade occupied the same mid-century American underworld of desire, corsetry, and control fantasies.
Related figures for further reading include Irving Klaw, John Willie, Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew, Bettie Page, Dita Von Teese, and the broader history of fetish fashion. Useful secondary works include Pérez Seves’s Eric Stanton & the History of the Bizarre Underground (Schiffer, 2018, ISBN 978-0764355424); J.B. Rund’s editions of Possibilities: The Photographs of John Willie (Bélier Press, 2016) and The Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline (second edition, Bélier Press, 1999); George Monk’s Charles Guyette’s High Heeled Shoes: Photographs circa 1940 (Kindle, 2014); and Robert V. Bienvenu II’s PhD dissertation The Development of Sadomasochism as a Cultural Style in the Twentieth-Century United States (Indiana University, 1998). Online entry points include Pérez Seves’s FetHistory project and coverage of the Marston film. For kink audiences, Charles Guyette is the prototype American fetish merchant: G-strings and high heels as inventory, SM photos as product, prison as the price of being first, and a legacy that runs straight into Klaw, Willie, Stanton, and the visual language of modern fetish fashion.
