About AtomAge

AtomAge

AtomAge was a British fetish magazine published by clothing designer John Sutcliffe, first as an offshoot of his specialist clothing business and then, between 1972 and 1980, as a magazine in its own right running to 32 issues. Specialising in leather, rubber and PVC, it was described as the underground bible of leather, rubber and vinyl fetish wear throughout the 1970s. Its influence reached well beyond its readership: Sutcliffe's designs helped shape screen and stage images of fetish dress, informed the King's Road boutique Sex run by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, and were celebrated decades later in the FUEL book Dressing for Pleasure, which reprinted imagery from all 32 issues.

The magazine's history is also a history of the legal and social pressures on fetish culture in Britain. Sutcliffe built a registered business, a catalogue and then a magazine in the open, yet in 1982 a police raid following publication of a novel led him to agree to the destruction of his stock and the magazine's printing plates, a blow from which the business never fully recovered. He died at his desk in 1987. AtomAge is remembered both for what it published and for what its suppression revealed about its era.

John Sutcliffe and a Business Registered in 1957

John Sutcliffe began the AtomAge fetish clothing business in 1957, registering it, with a discretion that characterised the trade at the time, as a manufacturer of weatherproofs for lady pillion riders. Behind that respectable description lay a specialist workshop making garments in leather, rubber and PVC for customers whose tastes mainstream clothing retailers would not serve. The pillion-rider framing was not pure invention: protective, close-fitting, weatherproof clothing for motorcycling genuinely overlapped with the materials and silhouettes Sutcliffe's customers wanted, and motorcycling imagery remained part of the AtomAge world.

Sutcliffe was a maker as much as a publisher. He devised a sewing needle for vinyl and developed a method of attaching a muslin-type fabric to latex so that it could be sewn, technical innovations that solved real problems in working with difficult materials. Those inventions matter to the magazine's story because AtomAge was never a detached observer of fetish fashion. It was the public face of a workshop, written from inside a craft, and its authority came from the fact that the clothes it pictured could be, and were, actually made.

From Clothing Catalogue to Magazine, 1965 to 1972

The first AtomAge clothing catalogue appeared in 1965, giving Sutcliffe's customers photographs and descriptions of garments they could order. A catalogue, however, can only show products; the step taken in 1972, expanding the catalogue into a magazine, changed the relationship with readers. Issue 1 appeared in London in winter 1972, and the business later operated from premises in Park Royal, north London. The magazine format allowed space for readers' own photographs, correspondence and a sense of shared identity alongside the clothing for sale.

That shift, from selling garments to chronicling a scene, is what made AtomAge historically important. Across its 32 issues it documented Britain's emerging fetish community in its own terms, at a time when no mainstream publication would do so respectfully. Readers appeared in clothes they had made or bought, and the magazine functioned simultaneously as shop window, instruction manual and mirror for a subculture that otherwise had few public images of itself.

Leather, Rubber and PVC: The AtomAge Wardrobe

AtomAge specialised in leather, rubber and PVC, with a strong emphasis on catsuits, cloaks, hoods, masks and other enveloping garments. Its pages treated these materials with a connoisseur's attention: the shine of vinyl, the discipline of a fully fastened rubber suit, the practical craft of seams and zips. For readers, the magazine dignified interests that were usually caricatured or condemned. One of Sutcliffe's consistent aims, reflected in the magazine's tone, was to present fetish dress as a legitimate craft and a legitimate pleasure.

The range of interests the magazine covered was broad, extending from motorcycling dress and mask wearing to the many specialised enthusiasms of its correspondents. Because contributors included the readers themselves, AtomAge captured a period of amateur enthusiasm before fetish clothing became a larger, more commercial industry. The photographs now reprinted from its issues show suburban, home-made inventiveness as much as professional design, and that mixture is precisely what gives the magazine its documentary value for fashion and social historians.

The Avengers, Marianne Faithfull and Screen Influence

Sutcliffe's workshop stood behind some of the most famous fetish-inflected images of the 1960s. His work influenced the leather catsuits associated with Emma Peel in the television series The Avengers, the look that fixed the catsuit in the popular imagination, and he created the leather catsuit worn by Marianne Faithfull in the 1968 film The Girl on a Motorcycle. A designer whose day-to-day customers were private fetishists was thus also shaping what millions of television viewers and cinema audiences understood such clothing to look like.

That double life, underground supplier and uncredited influence on mainstream style, defined Sutcliffe's position in British fashion. The magazine published from 1972 onwards can be read as his claim to authorship: in AtomAge, the aesthetic that television had borrowed was presented in its original context, credited to its maker and worn by the community for whom it was designed. The catsuit's journey from Park Royal workshop to television screen and back to the magazine's pages is a compact history of how subcultural style moves into the mainstream.

Sex on the King's Road: Westwood and McLaren

AtomAge's influence on punk-era fashion came through Sex, the King's Road boutique run by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren between 1974 and 1976. Sutcliffe's work helped inspire the boutique's use of rubber, leather and fetish references, which Westwood and McLaren translated into a confrontational street style that became central to punk. The connection is now a standard part of accounts of both Sutcliffe and the boutique: the fetish workshop supplied a visual language that the King's Road turned into fashion rebellion.

The contrast between the two enterprises is instructive. Sutcliffe sold to adults who wore his clothes in private or within a scene; Sex sold the suggestion of that world to young shoppers in Chelsea. AtomAge documented the source culture with care and consent, while punk took the surfaces and made them public provocation. Historians of fashion trace that transfer through the magazine because its dated, illustrated issues provide the evidence of what the source culture actually looked like before its imagery was borrowed.

The Split of 1981: Rubberist and Bondage

The original AtomAge magazine ended in 1980, and in 1981 the publication split into two titles, AtomAge Rubberist and AtomAge Bondage, both of which continued to 1985. The division responded to a genuine divergence within the readership. Bondage material had become a larger presence in the late issues of the original magazine, and some rubber enthusiasts, whose interest centred on the material and the garments themselves, were unhappy with the change of emphasis. Two narrower magazines could serve each audience better than one divided title.

The split also shows a subculture maturing into distinct communities with their own preferences and publications, a pattern familiar from music and other scenes. AtomAge Rubberist continued the original magazine's clothing-centred approach, while AtomAge Bondage carried the more overt S and M content. That both titles survived for several years demonstrates the depth of the readership Sutcliffe had built. His publishing operation was no longer a single catalogue with ambitions; it was a small specialist press serving defined constituencies.

The 1982 Raid and the Destruction of the Plates

In 1982 Sutcliffe published the novel The Story of Gerda, and a copy sent to the police led to a raid on the AtomAge premises. To avoid prosecution he agreed to the destruction of all stock and of the magazine plates. The loss of the plates was especially severe: without them, the back issues could not be reprinted, and the physical archive of the business was broken up. Contemporary and later accounts agree that the business never fully recovered from the raid and its consequences.

The episode belongs to a longer history of obscenity enforcement against Britain's fetish and gay publishing, in which the threat of prosecution, rather than a trial, often achieved the censor's purpose. Sutcliffe, by then in his later years and running a small specialist firm, was in no position for a prolonged legal fight. The destruction he accepted under pressure is the reason original AtomAge material is scarce and why the later reprint book, assembled from surviving copies of all 32 issues, was a significant act of recovery.

Death in 1987 and a Vanishing Archive

John Sutcliffe died at his desk in 1987, an ending that those who knew the business found fitting for a man whose work and enterprise were inseparable. The split titles had already ended in 1985, and with the plates destroyed and the founder dead, AtomAge passed from a living business into memory and collectors' hands. For some years its reputation survived mainly within the fetish community itself, where Sutcliffe was regarded with something like reverence as a pioneer who had given the scene its clothes and its magazine.

Outside that community, the magazine risked being forgotten precisely because its archive had been attacked. Fetish publishing was rarely deposited, reviewed or catalogued by the institutions that preserve other kinds of magazines, and the 1982 destruction removed the publisher's own copies. The survival of a complete run of the 32 issues in private and specialist hands, sufficient for a publisher to reprint from in 2010, was therefore not a foregone conclusion. AtomAge's modern reputation rests on that narrow escape from total loss.

Dressing for Pleasure and the Magazine's Reputation Today

In 2010 FUEL published Dressing for Pleasure, edited by Jonny Trunk, reprinting imagery from all 32 issues of AtomAge. The book, covered by The Guardian in September 2010 and by style publications including Dazed, presented Sutcliffe to a general readership as a major, neglected figure in British design. Its pages allowed readers who would never find an original issue to see the range of the magazine: the workshop garments, the readers' photographs and the visual world that had influenced television, cinema and punk fashion.

With the book, AtomAge's description as the underground bible of 1970s fetish wear moved from scene folklore into documented fashion history. The magazine is now cited in accounts of latex and vinyl in mainstream fashion, in studies of the King's Road boutiques, and in histories of British subcultures. A publication that began as a clothing catalogue for a discreetly registered business ended by supplying historians with their best evidence of how a hidden community dressed, organised and imagined itself in the 1970s.