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Market for Luxury Upscale Sex Merchandise

NEW YORK – Melinda Hackett, an artist, peered at the streamlined, stone-colored object at Myla, a boutique on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “It’s like a Brancusi,” she murmured, turning for a second opinion to Diana Oswald, a friend.

Oswald regarded the item quizzically. “It looks like a shoe form,” she said, straining for a closer look. “On second thought, I’d put it under a plexiglass box with a little light on it,” she said. “That way someone would think I bought it as a sculpture. It’s black; that makes it a little bit forbidden.”

Apt, perhaps, since the article in question, a 9-inch wedge of resin shaped like a hipbone, made by Tom Dixon, the British design guru, was in fact a vibrator. As remote in appearance from the “marital aids” hawked at pornography shops as an Eames chair is from a straw stool, it was displayed under glass. advertisement The vibrator is one of the saucier attractions at Myla, the first American outpost of a British-owned chain of sex shops, which opened last Wednesday at 69th Street and Madison Avenue, across the street from Cartier and in a neighborhood with Loro Piana cashmeres and the Dolce & Gabbana boutique. The vibrator is among an expanding assortment of designer sex accessories gingerly making their way into sophisticated boutiques. Novelties bearing coy names like Bone and Shag Bag, they come in fucchsia, celadon and stone – and look discreet enough to exhibit on a dressing table.

There is the Mojo, a breast-shaped massager by Marc Newson, the designer of the Lever House restaurant; the rechargeable Pebble by Mari-Ruth Oda, a stone-shaped plastic vibrator ergonomically contoured to fit in the palm of one’s hand; the Wrapped G-Spot, offered in cobalt or clear glass; and the Silver Bullet, a 2 1/4-inch gleaming vibrator offered by Toys in Babeland, a store and Web site selling sex toys for women.

Many of these gadgets are tailored for an increasingly design-savvy public, and are chic (if bawdy) expressions of what scholars of consumerism have called the aesthetization of everyday life. Juliet B. Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College and the author of “The Overspent American” (Basic Books, 1998), said: “When our homes and bathrooms have become temples of design and status-seeking, and when people upscale their sheets, their toilets and their toothbrushes, should we be surprised that they upscale their sex toys, too? Probably not.”

Nor is it surprising that the designers of erotic playthings have focused on aesthetics, trying to remove at least some of the stigma of conventional sex toys: that they are vulgar, ugly and unnatural. A few, like Dixon, the head of design at Habitat, seem to view the overhaul of the standard-issue vibrator as the ultimate design challenge. “I was struck by how cluttered and trite most of those objects were,” said Dixon, who is known for his quirky S-curved chairs. “They were appalling in every way, in their engineering, their packaging, their marketing and even their literature. Here, I told myself, is visibly an opportunity.”

At the same time merchants see a chance to attract shoppers with tastes as rich as their pocketbooks. “If you’re wearing Jimmy Choo shoes and carrying a Prada bag or using an orange press designed by Philippe Starck,” said Charlotte Semler, an owner of Myla, “why on earth would you want a conventional sex toy? It just doesn’t fit.”

“There definitely is a market for luxury upscale sex merchandise,” said Aimee Rabinowitz, the creative director of the gift shop at the Delano hotel in Miami Beach, Fla. There, items like a crystal-studded whip ($350) and the Mile-High Travel Kit, a pouch containing silk pasties, a feather and lubricant ($295), are showcased among cherry wood fixtures and lemon-colored walls in a room designed by Starck.

A handful of like-minded retailers display their wares in spotless, sumptuous settings, alongside silk camisoles, pashmina shawls, aromatic candles and mink-lined mules. “A luxurious context is what has been missing in design related to this industry,” said Campion Platt, the architect and an owner of the Mercer hotel in SoHo. Platt is in talks with Myla to gussy up the 400-square-foot boutique, the first sex shop on the Upper East Side.

The store’s redesign, he said, will be different from the pink-and-white boudoir-like setting of Agent Provocateur, the British purveyor of racy lingerie, which has an outpost on Mercer Street in SoHo, and from such depots of kitsch as Toys in Babeland Platt is thinking of adding a divan and glass jewelry cases. “I want it to look more residential than commercial,” he said, “so that you can imagine a kind of grand dressing room.”

That concept is not novel to Nathalie Rykiel, a daughter of the French designer Sonia Rykiel and the owner of Rykiel Woman, several luxuriously appointed sex shops in Paris, London and Moscow. Following Rykiel’s dictum that “the decor of a sex shop must be as beautiful as the toys,” her boutiques, all dusky lighting, are stocked with cashmere robes, teddy bears and vibrators shaped like lipstick tubes, each packaged in its own tiny black silk bag.

The idea is to make shoppers “feel unguilty and even cool about what they are doing,” Rykiel said.

The strategy has met with some success. In Paris young women display their black silk bags like trophies, “just to show they have been in the shop,” Rykiel said. She is scouting locations for a store in Manhattan. “Finally New Yorkers are ready,” she said.

Maybe. There are indications that Americans’ squeamishness toward sex toys is subsiding, thanks in part to the notorious episode of “Sex and the City” in which Charlotte becomes hooked on her vibrator.

Over the past five years sales of sex toys have increased 25 percent annually, according to Adult Video News, a trade magazine for the adult entertainment industry.

Nevertheless, many merchants balk at carrying sex accessories, no matter how fancy. “There is a resistance,” said Jeffrey Brown, whose erotic travel kits are sold on his Web site, www.houseofgroove.com, and at W hotels. It has been a struggle, he said, trying to place his Shag Bag, a mink condom wallet, in department stores.

Items like Myla’s Tom Dixon vibrator have found takers, and even spawned a waiting list of about 500 people, Semler said. The price, about $375, is no hurdle, she said. “The higher the ticket, the faster it sells.”

 

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