Fetish art is art that depicts people in fetishistic situations such as S&M, domination/submission, bondage, transvestism and the like, sometimes in combination.
Fetish art can simply depict a person dressed in fetish clothing, which includes undergarments, stockings, high heels, corsets and boots. A common fetish theme is a woman dressed as a dominatrix.
Many of the 'classic' 1940s, 1950s and 1960s-era fetish artists such as Eric Stanton and Gene Bilbrew began their careers at Irving Klaw's Movie Star News company (later Nutrix), creating drawings for episodic illustrated bondage stories.
In 1954 fetish artist John Coutts (a.k.a. John Willie) founded Bizarre magazine. Bizarre was published in London and widely distributed in the U.S., and was the inspiration for a number of new fetish magazines such as Bizarre Life. In 1957 English engineer John Sutcliffe founded Atomage magazine, which featured images of the rubber clothing he had made. Sutcliffe's work would inspire Dianna Rigg's leather-catsuit-wearing character in The Avengers, a TV show that "opened the floodgates for fetish-SM images".
In the 1970s and 1980s, fetish artists like Robert Bishop were published extensively in bondage magazines. In recent years, the annual SIGNY awards have been awarded to the bondage artists voted the best of that year. Many artists working in the mainstream comic book industry have included fetishistic imagery in their work, usually as a shock tactic or to denote villainy or corruption. The boost that depictions of beautiful women in tight fetish outfits give to the sales of comics to a mostly teenage male comic-buying audience may also be a factor.