With contributions from Elena Velez, Sean Conroe, and Walker Bunting, No Erotica spills unsanitised fantasies onto the page
It starts with a flaccid penis, and then a short story about deep-throating strangers in a bathhouse, and then some candid polaroids of penetrative sex. The third edition of No Erotica brings together some of the most random figures within fashion, literature and TV to spill explicit fantasies onto the page. It’s filth and it’s smut and it’s porn, stuffed with suggestive Q&As and pictures of people pissing into mid-air. “The first issues were basically an accident: our friends taking nudes on their vacations at the end of last summer and writing fantastical, porny scenarios around them,” Alex Tsebelis and Chloe Mackey of New York’s No Agency explain. “And based on the response to those, it seems culture is DYING for unsanitised stuff.”
No Agency – which is billed as an “art-adjacent” talent agency – is no humdrum IMG. Its show packages have seen models walk through AR hinterlands, DIY zines and fake casting calls – none of which make a whole lot of sense other than being an excuse for the models to have fun and funk with the normal go-see format. This latest project has been designed to allow collaborators and talent to experiment with their craft with an unfiltered, tongue-in-cheek approach. But it also has a literary bent, with writing from Sean Conroe, Matthew Davis and Peter Vack, which helps to bolster the whole “art-adjacent” thing. “It’s very free-form but the stories weave together in certain ways, and some people’s characters appear in other people’s stories, whether on purpose or by accident.”
The centrepiece, however, is Walker Bunting's editorial which sees Mariah Morvant crouch on bland kitchen counters in nothing but a pair of steel heels. “That was Elena Velez’s idea,” the duo say. “It was meant to showcase a different side to her clothes because they’re sexy and feminine but also harsh and bondage-like.” That – plus all the flash photography and shake-and-go Polaroids – seems to recall the 2010’s obsession with provocative fashion campaigns. It’s what TikTok people are calling “indie sleaze”, an aesthetic that has actually taken off in New York. “You’re lucky it hasn’t reached London. It means you never lost the grungy side of parties, fashion, and photography. You publish magazines like Dazed. We don’t have that here, so I think New Yorkers are always mourning what New York used to be like.”
But New York agents also used to pimp out their models to sleazo photographers, which Tsebelis and Mackey seem to satirise as old-school fashion lore. The cover of No Erotica’s second issue, for example, captured two Russian models in a shared apartment getting ready to go to a table at 1OAK. The back pages of this issue, meanwhile, feature hammed-up interviews with questions like “Favourite position?” It’s about “giving people a place to poke fun at the darker side of the industry,” the co-founders say. “But the photos are always shot by their partners or friends and the modes have complete creative control. So the whole thing is faking the more uncomfortable aspects of vintage men’s magazines.” Click through the gallery above to see some of the highlights from the third issue of No Erotica and click here to see more.
