Nylon Fetish: Inside the Lush, Fetish-Poetic World of Nylon Sonata
- Filip
- Jun 17
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 19
To enter the world of Nicholas D. Celano is to be gently unraveled. The Italian-born visual artist, writer, and filmmaker doesn’t just blur the line between memory and fantasy — he drenches it in soft tension and lets you sit with the ambiguity.
Written by: Amanda Sandström Beijer
His latest project, Nylon Sonata, is a deeply intimate short film meditating on identity, visibility, and erotic presence. Using nylon as both medium and metaphor, Celano sculpts a cinematic world that’s tender, voyeuristic, and quietly radical.
“I’d say my work creates a sense of intimate disorientation — like remembering something that never happened, but still feels true.”
Nicholas’s creative path is far from linear: from drawing manga as a kid, to fronting a punk band, to becoming a tattoo artist at 17, then relocating to China with dreams of martial arts cinema. That journey became foundational — not just aesthetically, but emotionally. His art now lives in the slippage between stillness and sensation.
Nylon as Language
Why nylon? For Celano, it’s not just a fetish object — though that allure is certainly present. It’s a material charged with contradictions: softness and control, femininity and power, concealment and exposure.
“Nylon carries a kind of quiet tension... a second skin, a mask, a container for desire both seen and unseen.”
He speaks of how light behaves on nylon — especially around the knees — creating painterly effects that feel “fragile, intimate, and deliberate.” The fabric becomes a tool to explore projection, objectification, and self-mythology.
“It’s not about the fetish itself, but what it evokes: longing, performance, fragility, resistance.”
Voyeurism Reversed
Much of Nylon Sonata plays with power and gaze. While the film features a photographer character, it’s not his gaze we inhabit.
“The camera doesn’t belong to him — it belongs the subject. She’s not being captured; she’s composing herself.”
This reframing of voyeurism challenges assumptions around the male gaze. The viewer, positioned intimately close, is complicit — yet never fully in control.
“Voyeurism in my work becomes about self-exposure rather than objectification. About reclaiming the frame.”
Ritual, Slowness, and Kink
There’s a deliberate stillness in Celano’s visuals — a hypnotic pacing that echoes the slow choreography of BDSM rituals.
“The slowness invites the viewer to lean in... not as spectacle, but as something lived and deeply felt.”
Kink here isn’t provocation — it’s presence. A sacred rhythm. Every frame is composed, intentional, and layered with emotional texture. His influences, ranging from Wong Kar-wai and Zhang Yimou to Francesca Woodman and Maxime Ballesteros, all share this ethos: a deep romance with atmosphere, intimacy, and refusal to explain.
“Eroticism, when it’s honest, is a language. It’s about longing, vulnerability, memory, identity.”
Objectification as Choice
One of the film’s most potent themes is what Celano calls ethical objectification — a phrase that could just as easily double as a manifesto.
“When approached ethically, objectification becomes a conscious, collaborative act. The subject is not a passive object, but an active creator of their image and narrative.”
In Nylon Sonata, the subject Jing is both muse and mirror. The film is an archive of her own transformation — and a metaphor for Celano’s.
“It’s about taking back authorship over your image, your body, your identity. And choosing to be visible in a world that often prefers you silent.”
From Italy to China, From Fetish to Film
While the work is poetic and emotionally lush, it’s also undeniably political. Celano’s years living in rural China shaped his sensitivity to class, access, and who gets to be seen.
“There’s always an underlying resistance — a reclaiming of autonomy and honesty that resonates beyond the surface.”
His aesthetic isn’t performative kink for mainstream appetite. It’s private desire made visible — but never easy. In many ways, it’s a response to digital saturation and instant judgment.
“We live in a time where sex is everywhere but rarely meaningful. When something is everywhere, it stops being intimate.”
Instead, Celano insists on intimacy. On the slowness of erotic presence. On fetish not as costume, but as history, memory, and language.
“Growing up in Italy in the ‘90s, stockings weren’t just garments. They were a silent language of the women around me — a visual imprint that lingers in me like a quiet echo.”
What’s Next
For now, he’s focused on getting Nylon Sonata funded. Kickstarter is, as he puts it, “a quiet act of resistance” in itself — a way to bypass gatekeepers and let erotic indie work bloom on its own terms.
“Every pledge counts. It reinforces how important community is — the people who believe in the story and want to see it realized.”
And creatively? He’s obsessed with the way nylon catches light — and the erotic friction between control and surrender.
“There’s a slow seduction in watching fabric come alive under shifting shadows — like a quiet invitation to feel more deeply.”
Support Nylon Sonata on Kickstarter→ Kickstarter
Follow Nicholas D. Celano→ Website
