Hot Sauce and hairy toes
All-new sex magazine Hot Sauce has an irresistible strap-line: “choke on it”. Playfully printed on the top left corner of a cover that’s more typographic than pornographic, it’s a promise of explicit things to come. That promise is partly fulfilled. Themed ‘The Talk’, this first issue is about honest sexual communication. A lot of the magazine is devoted to sex confessions in the vein of this choice line about a gassy lover, printed on the first page: “Now he’s just this weird guy that I’ve slept with, who looks at me and farts after we have sex”.
The most interesting bits of the mag, though, are not explicit. One genuinely shocking page just features an extreme close-up of a hairy-toed foot. Another is an ornate gold sculpture of a vulva.
We asked editor Annabelle Peacock to talk us through Hot Sauce in five images.
“I’m kinda obsessed with old magazines — ones from the 70s like old Playboys and Novas (both are reference points for Hot Sauce). There’s one in particular called Viva that was like Playgirl and was published by Penthouse’s Bob Guccione and his wife Kathy Keeton. They created shoots around nude male pin ups — but unlike today the men weren’t always ripped or pruned or dripping in baby oil with a potato in their pants. There was often something quite vulnerable about them, which I found interesting. This kind of honest portrayal of the more endearing side to the guys became the mood of the Meet the Boys series.
We shot in a friend’s warehouse as Marisol (the photographer) and I thought it had to be somewhere relaxed. The guys we photographed — Barney, Rodrigo and Szymon — were all friends of friends. Basically the whole day was pretty chilled and then afterwards we hung out a little, which is when this photo happened. That evening two of the boys hit it off. They’re both super talented artists so I guess they already had something in common.”
“This piece is entitled ‘My head hurts, my feet stink and I don’t like Jesus’, by the artist Rayvenn d’Clark. I found it interesting that Rayvenn had chosen a foot — like I would have expected a vulva or a breast or something that’s more shocking than a foot — but I guess that’s what makes it so provocative? I think the point is that it’s still a part of her that was potentially previously overlooked, and has had a major role in her artistic development.
Anyway, who says feet aren’t sexy?“
“I wanted to pay homage to the ordinary boob, so I asked a load of my friends to come round and get their tits papped in a way that they felt comfortable. They chose their pose and decided what they would expose. It was actually so much fun — I highly recommend it as a bonding activity. Obviously, the chatter had all been about boobs and it turned out there were loads of random facts about tits that we didn’t know and ended up including in the magazine. Like, the biggest natural boobs in the world weigh in at size 48V. The woman who owns them is this incredible 60-year-old fetish model who has created a business out of them (she has a Guinness World Record under her belt) and whose stage name, Norma Stitz, is a word play on “enormous tits”. I mean — what a woman!”
“This image accompanies a piece by Ella Storey about aphrodisiac fruit and veg. Lots of wisdom there, like ‘once you move past the fact that it makes your wee smell and they look like tiny paintbrushes, asparagus are known for being the king veggie for arousing and stimulating a person’s sex hormones.'”
“This sculpture by Nicola Bacchilega is called Vitae. It’s the genital segment of a full suit of armour he made as part of his womenswear collection.
Nicola is a trained sculptor from an area in Italy that is obsessed with ceramics. Upon turning 20, he realised that he wanted to go in more of a fashion direction with his career, so he self-trained in design and started his own brand: Nicola Bacchilega. This piece, as part of the armour, took about three months to make and was inspired by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s attempt to define emancipation.”
