GLR January-February 2026

great example. A flexed foot in a high-fashion ad can carry as much erotic weight as a fully nude body because the male gayze is about æsthetic pleasure—hunger, obsession, control. Going further, the sock can be seen as a curtain, and curtains build the aters. What looks like a minor accessory becomes so significant to many: how its fabric holds humidity, retains salt, records pressure. A sock can then be an index of where the body has been and whom it has touched. In queer photographic scenes, whether domestic or staged, the sock works less as accessory than as interface: It translates touch into image. Many of Wolfgang Tillmans’ most beautiful shots make this legible as intimacy studies. Some of these were recently displayed in his solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou, defying the most “vanilla” viewer with a desecrating purity. In these large images, socks and insteps read like weather reports of intimacy—creases, humidity, elastic burns. They isolate heels, ankles, even knees in shallow domestic space—limbs cut from context yet still connected by light, by ribbed cotton. The picture hums with withheld weight, a weather map of bodies that just exited or are about to exit the scene. Tillmans’ point is neither the garment nor his subject but the microclimate of touch it remembers. Johnny Abbate’s Stolen Socks series (figure at right) refuses to let memory stay abstract. The works pair Polaroid images shot from the photographer’s vantage point—his socked feet foregrounding a nude standing at the bed’s edge—with the ac tual socks worn by the model in the photograph sealed into the same frame. The pieces of cloth function then as a relic, some thing that has touched the icon and serves as its replacement— its presence in absence. It’s not just “proof of contact,” it’s an ethics of transmission. It shows how desire circulates from body to cloth to image (simulacra) to viewer. The fetish object isn’t a substitute; it’s a carrier. As Jean Baudrillard would argue, what circulates here is not representation but simulation —a sign that no longer refers to the original body, only to other signs of touch and proximity. The relic doesn’t recall an absent subject; it generates its own pres ence, an erotic hyperreal in which the aura is produced through iteration. The photograph and the sock are not copies but simu lacra that feed each other, performing what Baudrillard called “the ecstatic proliferation of the image.” Queer photography his tory backs it further: Peter Hujar’s tactile plasticity, Robert Map plethorpe’s tough rigidness, Bob Mizer’s beach-body tableaux. Even when feet aren’t the subject, they keep hijacking the scene: a heel digging into sand, a flexed arch redirecting the eye up ward, an ankle that quietly governs the pose. F EET IN C ONTEMPORARY M EDIA I N THE DIGITAL ERA , this fascination has intensified. Fast-for ward from classical sculpture to the Grindr grid, and feet re main one of the most explicitly fetishized body parts. Social media and the amateur porn site OnlyFans have turned foot fetishism into a curated digital art form worth billions. The porn industry has long relied on the staging of feet—angles, lighting, close-ups. The flex of a sole, the point of a toe, the tension of an ankle, especially how they twirl and contract dur ing the orgasm shot, also referred to as the money shot. And let’s not forget the images of accused killer Luigi Mangione’s moccasin-inspired loafers, his bare ankles exposed above the 12

Johnny Abbate. From the Stolen Socks series.

shoes, that circulated all over X and TikTok. Such platforms didn’t invent the fetish, of course, but they’ve have taken advantage of us foot freaks by industrializ ing it. Even celebrities know it—and play with it. Ricky Mar tin has not hidden his use, both as viewer and viewed, of the foot-fetish site wikiFeet, archive and encyclopedia of VIP’s soles. FeetFinder helps connect supply with demand in the cre ator industry. Generative artificial intelligence has recently flooded time lines with feet—sometimes as the butt of a joke (the program in cluded too many toes!), increasingly as erotica. The real story here isn’t “good versus bad rendering,” it’s how AI opera tionalizes the fetish. Make the foot credible and the whole body becomes believable. In Baudrillard’s terms, AI images can be read as third-order simulacra—circulating signs with no privi leged original. It’s kink 4.0: a loop of search, sight, arousal, rat ing, refinement. The platform doesn’t just host the kink; it trains it. Under that regime, the sock’s crease pattern is data; the damp outline on tile is metadata; the “almost-step” is a reusable prompt. The partial object is now programmable. As we have seen, the arc is continuous. Classical sculpture staged the foot as the body’s anchor. Photography showed that the foot could steal the scene through exposure control. Online platforms standardized that theft into genres. AI feeds it back as a set of adjustable sliders. Same device, new interfaces. The erotic power of feet is not an eccentric detour; it’s the spine of an image culture that has always asked us to finish the picture with our bodies. Feet have never really been “just feet”—they’ve always car ried more weight than we’ve acknowledged. They exist between movement and stillness, exposure and concealment, reality and fetish. They are our roots, they move us. From pedestal to plat form, from marble grain to pixel noise, the image plugs in at the foot—and so do we. So let a part stand for the whole and let pleas ure stop asking for permission from identity. That’s the queerest flex: building an erotic world on what holds us up.

TheG & LR