Photo by Ellen von Unwerth
The Marais, Paris. I enter a barred, wooden carriage gate and follow a path into a cobbled courtyard full of jasmine.
"Rebecca."
At one window, the blind is half drawn. Black Yves Saint Laurent shoes arch two perfect feet; moon-white calves; a taut pencil skirt... A slender frame with a tiny waist; dark copper hair straight over her shoulder with an angular fringe across her face; alabaster throat; red lips; green eyes flickering between bashful and steel. Betony Vernon beckons me: "Come into Eden."
This story began in December 2010, at Coco de Mer. Each Christmas, the erotic boutique invites favourite clients to a special salon. The seasoned crowd knows one end of a flogger from the other, and has interesting ideas of what to do with both. But that night they sat, rapt, as a 6' Bettie Page fantasy in a corset and spiked heels ordered a petite blonde to bend over and clasp her ankles.
"If she stands like this, it stretches the skin and the muscles tauten, increasing sensation," Vernon explained, unclipping the leather collier she was wearing, pulling it straight into a whip. "This whip ismean," she purred, and proceeded, expertly, to show us that indeed it was. "But, it doesn't have to be."
As Vernon worked, I realised it was not just her necklace that had a double use. Vernon's silver bracelets had runners for rope. Her ring was set with pearls that were part adornment, part device. By the time she passed around a mahogany spanker - the wood polished soft to the touch, with an ergonomic silver handle - it was clear she was a mistress of eroticism, a rare woman whom I would have to track down.
"Eden" is Vernon's private salon. As she leads me inside, down a spiral staircase, she explains, "It is a 17th-century vault, which used to belong to the nuns of the Abbey of Malnoue. Now it's my boudoir." The décor of the long, arched room is elegant. My first glance takes in a low, suede sofa, lacquer tables and a bespoke set of mahogany drawers topped with tall triptych mirrors. Then you notice the rings screwed into the ceiling. The leather floor. And that she entirely controls the environment: the light, the sound. "It is completely insulated," she smiles. "No one can hear us..."
At one end there is a pink suede isolation chamber. The inside of a cupboard door at the other is hung with floggers. She opens a few of the armoire drawers, catching the clasp with short scarlet nails. Each is lined in leather and backlit like a cartoon treasure chest - a deerskin flogger here, a pair of silver nipple clamps there, a pheasant-feather tickler...
"For a truly great sexual experience you tease the eye, tease the mind, tease the body and turn on all of the senses. If you're just going to get yourself off in 15 minutes, you will never know the meaning of a sexual high. In three hours you can really start to reach higher dimensions in the sexual realm, but over that length of time it is never going to be genitally oriented sex alone: you have to know how to treat the entire body as a sexual and sensorial whole."
As a teenager in Virginia, Vernon worked in a vintage shop whose wares included corsets, leather harnesses and body bags. "My initiation to sex began with the hard-core."
A goldsmith since 17, she took a degree in art history and a masters degree in industrial design in Milan. But alongside her own jewellery - she made collections for Gianfranco Ferré, Fornasetti and Missoni - Betony started her sado-chic collection in 1992: beautiful items that were either invitation to, or equipment for "play".
"The erotic objects, the bejewelled tools, were driven by my own needs. Initially I didn't think there was a wider market for them, I made them for myself." This is perhaps their secret. An aesthete and a hedonist, Vernon loves to make love.
"We have lost the sense of sex as an art form, the alchemy of slow sex. Ultimate sex transcends the pain/pleasure barrier, even if we don't use tools at all. Too many people are stressed, on Prozac, getting fatter by the bite. If only they could learn to prioritise their sex lives. My luxury tools are a response to the cheap, tacky, disposable sex gadgets that abound. Beauty and pleasure are the real taboos - not sex itself."
Her desire to spread the word led Vernon to found her first salon, Paradise Found, in 2004. "I adore the 17th-century concept of a place where people could come together to learn and explore ideas. I am an educator. I inaugurated Paradise to work with couples. Then I decided to do Eden so I could work with slightly larger fruits. The sessions are hands-on - when I want them to be - but it is not as though you can just call in and say, 'Can I have a session, love?' No, no.
"I work around my objects. They are an interface for everything that I do. If someone buys an anal dilator kit, of course I'm not going to show them how to use it. I am not going to say, 'Bend over baby, I'm going to dilate your anus!' but I will teach them how to use it on their partner to ecstatic effect."
Those who want to learn from Betony Vernon must contact her through her website betonyvernon.com, where her collection of sex toys, tools and treats are available to pursue and purchase.
Contact her and, if you pique her interest, she might accept you as a pupil.
Original article published in GQ Magazine, in May, 2012
