Genevieve Gaelyn's Rubber Designs Are Slinky Second Skins

I'm standing in front of the Gay Cable cameraman in a blue latex dress that squeezes my stomach flat, drops down the top of my breasts and spills onto the floor behind my heels. Shiny blue rubber clings to my torso like a wetsuit, then flares out in a floor-length skirt. Ruffled yellow sleeves hang at the edge of my shoulders. A triangle of translucent latex shoots up the back of the dress and my legs flash, blurry and vague, through the material.

I am the first person this evening to slip?slide, squeeze my body?into one of Genevieve Gaelyn's designs, fashioned from recycled bicycle innertubes. The cameraman who documents the opening of Gaelyn's store, Gaelyn Designs, shoots a few seconds of me standing awkward and self-conscious before a reflection of myself in a full-length mirror, fingering thin, watery fabric. The dress surprises me. I expect impossibly snug discomfort and sticky heat, but the skintight bodice doesn't hurt my lungs or ribcage, and the skirt feels cool on my legs, like walking through a thick fluid.

Gaelyn's business partner, Anna Cianfarani, takes a spray can out of the dressing room and tells me to rub some of the greasy liquid into the dress to make it shine. It's the same spray I was instructed to apply to my hips when I first stepped into the dressing room, so that the dress would "slip right on." Now it makes the rubber glisten and reflect white stripes of track lighting. The tag hanging down my back identifies the dress as "The Juliet Gown," which sells for $468.

I'm Juliet in imitation leather, drinking a Dixie cup of pinot grigio and eating cracked green olives in the back room, the workshop, with Cianfarani and Gaelyn and young men and women with tattoos and piercings. The front of the shop?which is the size of a dining room?is a pretty room of yellow walls and blond floors with raging feminist art leaping from the walls: pictures of naked women tinted fluorescent colors, blurbs of body-image rants pasted below, flipbooks of the artist covered by a slab of raw meat that peels away in chunks to reveal the real, unaltered body beneath. Gaelyn and Cianfarani have decided that their shop will double as an art gallery, with new artists every two months. Christy Fisher and Andi Stover's work adorns the walls opening night, a collection that as a whole becomes an artistic rejection of societal demands placed on women to alter the way they look. And next to the artwork stand racks and racks of latex corsets.

"I'm making corsets to be something women want to wear," Gaelyn says when asked if her work might conflict with the message of Fisher's and Stover's art. She is dressed elegantly in a flowered halter and black skirt, her short blonde hair brushed away from her face and her eyelids painted gold. She explains that the feeling women derive from wearing latex is one of empowerment. "It's Xena appeal."

Cianfarani nods in agreement, curly brown Mohawk bobbing.

Back in the makeshift dressing room of red velvet curtains, I peel the Juliet Gown off my skin and step into the Cocktail Dress?tight, black, short, with an open, plunging neckline, just-off-the-shoulder sleeves and huge red lips that open over my stomach to reveal vampire fangs.

Another girl disappears into the dressing room?I pass her a can of spray and dressing instructions?and women start to unhook the hangers, carry around dresses self-consciously and eye the dressing curtains. The thought of climbing into a latex body glove is unnerving. As the wine bottles empty, short red miniskirts and tight green shirt-and-skirt combos replace "Lesbo" t-shirts and jeans. Makeovers escalate, become more elaborate. Clear neck corsets. Silver warrior-like tanks for men. Fingerless gloves. Baby t's. I end up in a dark green Asian dress, oval opening between my breasts, slits up both legs, turtleneck collar buttoned with rope.

"That's hot," I'm told when I step into the workshop.

Purple dress with fringe slanted across the side. Lime-green outfit to match the hair of the girl who tries it on. A blue shirt and skirt with white fringe make me feel like a piece of candy. The shirt flares out in rippled latex at my waist, the skirt in a matching flare above my knees.

"Yeah," someone agrees when I share the candy sentiment, "you look kind of like bubblegum."

The dress that makes the biggest splash is one of the Juliet Gowns, fashioned entirely from the translucent latex that made up the back triangle of mine. Stretched and fitted around skin, the material changes from translucent to transparent. Its model, the immediate center of attention, dons the matching neck corset and stands engulfed in latex and fully exposed. Her nipples are pressed into pimpled brown saucers. A triangle of pubic hair presses against the rubber. Someone asks Gaelyn for a "snatch solution."

"Well, I've seen some people dye it?like you can dye it bright red or something," she explains. "Or you can just wax it off."

Horrified winces. The dress goes back on the hanger.

All that slipping and spraying and squeezing in and out of recycled bicycle innertubes becomes exhausting. These clothes take effort. I return to my cotton-poly blends and retire to the workshop, where the fetish-meets-fashion party has congregated around fruit and cheese and crackers. A few women nibble olive bread in dominatrix wear. Cianfarani polishes a man in a corset. Light clings to and fingers and splashes latex.