Girl on the Net

I met this week’s guest blogger – F. Leonora Solomon – at Eroticon this year, and she’s amazing. Leonora’s an editor and writer who lives in New York City, and she’s published and featured in several anthologies – please do check them out via the links in the piece and on her website. I got the chance to chat with her in between the Eroticon sessions, and when she suggested a guest post about this particular topic I practically squealed with glee. It’s one of those kinks that also makes me go a bit giddy and trembly. Today she’s going to tell you about her suit fetish… 

The suit fetish…

I was on the train listening to a friend talk about her fetish, which fell into my your kink is not my kink category. But I was genuinely interested in listening to her talk about it. I liked her passion, particularly the reverent way she described how she felt about certain aspects of it…and it was there that I made the connection.

On the train as a teenager, I always got excited at the Lower Manhattan stops because I liked seeing men get on in suits. When I graduated college and started working, I developed a crush on a man primarily because of how well he wore a suit. He knew how to wear a suit like his own skin,  even when he went into his office, took off his jacket and flipped his tie over his shoulder. From him, I learned what a man’s tie says about him in relationship to his attire. Details are very important to me: (bow)ties, suspenders, vests, cufflinks, handkerchiefs…these all enhance my experience.

Needless to say there was a great deal of suit action while Mad Men was on the air, along with retro and vintage fashion which I am also obsessed with! But seeing Don Draper in a suit with his stern face, and oh…the hat! Sunday. Night. Made. Honestly, when he was not in some variation of suit—jacket on or not—my interest was not as piqued.

Suits are a reoccurring theme in my writing. When the Kink of the Week meme featured suits, I got excited just from thinking about what I was going to write about! Embracing my excitement about suits has helped me to learn about myself in a way I had not before. My suit kink is not my friend’s kink, but she smiled with recognition as I started describing passionately how I felt about seeing men in suits. A man in a really great suit is as intoxicating to me as a man reading a book… the two combined is lethal…

Since I wrote the Kink of the Week post, I have considered other opinions about suits. And what about suits on women? I can tell you that I thought K.D. Lang looked very attractive on the cover of her album, Drag. I also distinctly remember Linda Evangelista in a suit, a photograph of which I posted on my Facebook profile and it got the same amount of likes and comments as its male counterparts.

If I suit up a character it means that I want that character to project all the things I connect with donning a suit. I am happy when that aspect of me bleeds into my fiction. It is kind of like Edith Templeton who wrote about life experiences of hers that colored her fiction. I do not write stories that closely mirror my own life like Templeton, but I feel safe when my ideas and themes are prevalent in a piece that I write. I love suits, and I love them omnipresent representing a bit of me in my work when I want them there.

My Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram definitely reflect my suit fetish, and a lot of other fetishes for that matter! This story that I recently wrote for Lelo, was inspired by a particular suit. I had an entirely different idea at first, but seeing this suit modeled before my eyes wrote another story for me.

Someone I just met, asked me if I ever wore a suit? I got actual chills, because I never have and the thought never occurred to me. The idea is exciting to me. I do love white dress shirts on myself, and I would definitely not be opposed to slipping a (bow)tie about my neck…

F. Leonora Solomon is an editor and writer, who lives in New York City. As an editor, she has published several anthologies, most recently TIE ME UP. As a writer, her short stories have been featured in anthologies, including CHEMICAL [se]X and SPY GAMES. She is a bibliophile, and has severe wanderlust… Visit her site at fdotleonora.wordpress.com, where you can find all of her social media outlets and books.