Still 'Fashionably Laid'? Costume and Contemporary Pornography

This article analyses the role of costume in contemporary heterosexual hard-core moving-image pornography. Building upon a previous study (Church Gibson and Kirkham 2012), it focuses on the representation of youth in a sub-site of the American website Reality Kings (2000–present). By drawing on an emergent yet fragmented body of work in this field, it situates the importance of costume and dress in communicating aspects of gendered identity and debates pornography’s use of ‘authentic’ visual strategies. In addition, it problematizes the much-discussed concept of ‘pornification’, arguing for the recognition of an inverse effect in pornographic texts.