Take a Bite into Fetish Culture with 'BRKFST'

A new biannual publication expressing fashion, art, and photography, all through the lens of fetish culture, emerges in BRKFST. It's a unique magazine with a point of view that represents various kinks and communities in a genuine and thoughtful way; real people, with real kinks, who present lust and vulnerability with innocence and genuine exhilaration. While fetishes are an intrinsically personal endeavor, BRKFST Magazine presents a platform to express and showcase enthusiasts amongst likeminded creatives to an openminded market. We had a chance to connect with founder and publisher Paul-Simon Djite to discuss his desires for the publication and why its topics are so timely today.

“I’ve always liked fetishized imagery and have been attracted to it as a reference point for my own fashion styling work. I've always been drawn to kink, but I've never found anything that represented kink and sophistication in a way that I admired,” Djite tells The Creators Project. “Most fetish imagery is staged and I don’t think that fetish porn is a real representation of what a fetish moment looks like. I wanted to change that with BRKFST, to present something more true to life on the human level. Make it a personal journey.”

Djite explains how kink and fetish play important roles in being outlets for desire. He tells us how individual sexual preferences, especially ones society at large looks down on, still need places of acceptance. “Without the kink subculture, people may find it difficult to express and enjoy themselves fully in a sexual manner,” Djite explains. “Fetish works to mitigate the buildup of pressure that is associated with sex and sexuality in the soup of our complex brain chemistries, and thus plays a very important role in helping us to maintain the external status quo that society at large expects of us to exhibit.”

With BRKFST Magazine, anything is possible in the world of creativity, expression and kink. “One person’s minimum is another person’s maximum so those are hard lines to draw,” Djite continues. “There’s a theme for every issue and this is how we try to build a framework within which our contributors should work. The first issue was about bodies and so I wanted to open up the floor to discuss any type of fetish that had to do with a body. Since the body is such an essential part of kink, any fetish could have been included in the first issue as long as a body was engaged in a fetishized way. It has to be fashionable, it has to be artistic, and it has to include a fetish. Those are the three guiding principles of BRKFST.”

“Everyone who I ask to shoot for BRKFST has a strong personal aesthetic that I feel could add something to the issue. One of the major things I wanted to do with BRKFST was to give the photographer full creative freedom, so I went to photographers who had quite strong voices and asked them to shoot whatever they wanted, however they wanted and just be themselves,” says Djite.

The acceptance of human relations is slowly coming to terms with publications like BRKFST, allowing them to exist due to an understanding that sexuality is a vast landscape and personal preferences are more subjective than deserving to be shamed. Djite explains, “I think that we're coming to understand that love is love. Regardless of gender, regardless of sex, and regardless of where you're from love is love and I think BRKFST plays into that idea in a fundamental way because a kink is a kink. It doesn't matter who you are or where you're from or how you were raised, sometimes you will develop a kink and you may not be able to explain it.

“Humans are wonderful, we just need to realize that we are all born to love by default, we are not born to hate by default, I think that gets lost a lot of the time. That idea needs reinforcing.”

Of course, while BRKFST offers digestible images that even the sexually modest can enjoy, we still have a long way to go until kinks are fully and widely accepted. Djite explains one of the struggles he ran into launching BRKFST: “I could not find a single printer in the USA who would print the magazine. They all found the content too sexualized to print, which I found strange and frustrating.” He explains. "The imagery is not porn, it is art and there is a difference. In the end I had to go to Europe to have the magazine printed. Die Keure printing, the same company who works with Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman were open to our concept and loved the idea of the magazine we were trying to create. It really turned out to be a blessing in disguise.”

"Once you enter the realm of kink you start to realize that being straight, gay, bisexual, or trans doesn’t really matter," Djite expresses. "Everyone has different fetishes and preferences so it becomes one and the same. People have been really intrigued and really taken aback by the beauty of BRKFST. The quality of the paper, the smell of the ink, and the tactile experience allows it to become more of a book than a magazine. I think people see that and are really blown away by the fact that a fetish can be made to look so appealing and approachable. The biggest thing is breaking down the barriers of what everyone visualizes a fetish to be.”

Click here to learn more about BRKFST Magazine.

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