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Nina Kate was never destined to be a normal girl. Her parents met when they were both on tour with The Rolling Stones – her mum was a PR for the band, and her dad was their pyrotechnician.

The result of that rock’n’roll union was a girl who lives life at hyperspeed. At the age of 24, Nina Kate’s been the singer and bass player for industrial band Sheep On Drugs, served a proper, old-school apprenticeship with a fetish clothing designer, and set up her own successful latex fashion company. She’s currently tendinga blooming career as an alternative model, and is happily married to the lead singer and guitarist of hardcore metal band The Defiled.

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And, as you can tell from these pictures, she’s ridiculously sexy. In pictures she looks like Marie Antoinette gone bad, her almond eyes and cute rosebud mouth juxtaposed against a sinfully-built body covered in tattoos, which is usually encased in skintight latex.

Judging by how she looks on these pages, you might expect a creature like Nina Kate to be moody and distant. But nothing could be further from the truth.

I meet her for cooling cocktails on a sunny, sticky day in a leafy part of north London. She’s quietly spoken, but utterly assured, without a trace of over-inflated ego. She’s wearing boots and a black, 1950s-style shirt dress, and eagerly shows me her new body-mod – a cute little surface piercing right in the middle of her chestpiece tattoo of a diamond.

The name of her company, Jane Doe, is boldly inked on her delicate knuckles. She’s warm, gossipy and grinny – the kind of girl you’d want as a cackling drinking buddy.

Nina Kate’s childhood was spent partly on the road with The Rolling Stones (“I was in love with Charlie Watts, but he could never understand why. I just thought he had a nice face,” she says), partly in the heart of alternative kid playground Camden Town, and partly in the more remote East Anglian towns of Norwich and Cambridge.

By the age of 18 she wanted to try her hand at designing fetish fashion, so she moved back to her childhood home of Camden and asked a latex designer for an apprenticeship. Her tasks were mainly repetitive, churning out tops and skirts – the bread and butter of the latex clothing industry.

But she appreciated the break. “It’s a bit like learning to be a tattoo artist,” she explains. “People don’t give away specialist knowledge easily, so you have to be lucky to get training.”

When she wasn’t at work, she was singing and playing bass for Sheep On Drugs, who she joined after being spotted at one of their shows. She left when a fellow member hit her over the head with a guitar on stage. “I got hit and I was like, ‘What was that?’” she grins. “I kept going and looked down and saw my husband and the manager. I thought, ‘Why are they looking so upset?’ I kept singing and walked off stage… He didn’t draw blood. I must have a thick skull. But
I knew it was time to leave.”

After leaving the band, Nina Kate dipped in and out of making fetish gear, and worked for a while at Torture Garden Clothing, but never felt as if she had the chance to express herself creatively. So when she was on a drunken night out and a friend suggested she should set up her own clothing company, she started work on it the next day. And so Jane Doe Latex was born. She took the name from the US police term for an unidentified female corpse. “It sounds kind of pretty,” she says. “But it’s got a little edge to it.”

In December 2005 Nina Kate held her first Jane Doe show, at the Christmas party of fetish club Torture Garden. She says she wanted it to be an “event”. “It took me about three months to make everything, and it was just me working on it. Alone. I felt like I had a lot to prove.”

And prove herself she did. It was at this show that Nina Kate established Jane Doe Latex’s distinctive look, using fur, feathers, skulls and beaks – alongside latex – to create weirdly beautiful juxtapositions. She presented a stunning peacock dress, made by weaving thousands of feathers together.

She had to source the feathers herself, travelling down to a curious wholesaler in Kent who sold them out of his shed. “He sells the feathers to the man who makes helmets for the Queen, so I was in good company!” she smiles. “He sells stuffed birds as well… with the heads. I was in there for hours and I came home with a giant bin bag stuffed to the brim.”

Perhaps not suprisingly, some people have criticised Nina Kate for her use of fur, feathers and leather. “I’m the world’s worst vegetarian!” she laughs. But she’s serious as she explains she sources all her fur second-hand. “There’s nothing you can do about those fur coats existing,” she says. “They probably belonged to old ladies and date back to the 1940s. Would you rather they were thrown in the bin to rot, or were used again? I know I’d rather my skin was used again.”

She continues: “The annoying thing is that some of the people who make a fuss about it are hard-core vegans, which is fair enough. But some people, especially the ones who object to fur, are hypocritical. I think, ‘Put down your leather handbag, take off your leather shoes and then disagree with me’. I don’t eat meat because I don’t agree with the way animals are farmed. I think it’s disgusting – but you can’t compare a farmed hamburger to a stuffed pheasant.”

The finished outfits are sexy, but they’re more about dressing up fun than bedroom perviness. “I don’t see my clothes as sexual, I see them as visual,” explains Nina Kate. “It’s more about fantasy – crazy costumes.” She’s also into fetishwear as a fashion statement rather than an emblem of lifestyle choices. “I think the general public look at fetish clubs and think that everyone spends their time there wife swapping, or living 24/7 domination lifestyles,” she muses. “But I think a lot of people just go because they find it fun, especially places like Torture Garden. It’s more of a fashionable, sociable place.

There are people who dislike it and say, ‘There’s not enough play’, or ‘there aren’t enough dungeon areas’, but I’m just not someone who’ll go along and have a chain around my neck. I guess I’m kind of old fashioned. I’ve got my husband and that’s fine – what we do doesn’t need to be witnessed by anyone else.”


Nina Kate’s clothes are the kind of creations you’d imagine characters in a painting by lowbrow art legend Liz McGrath to wear. She even has a tattoo depicting one of the LA creepshow artist’s works – a deer with galleons strung in its horns. And she shares McGrath’s love of weird taxidermied animals. “I love them, I just love them!” Nina Kate enthuses wickedly.

“I want my house to look like the Natural History Museum. Every time you visit, you should walk through it thinking ‘What the fuck is that?’”

Most of her collection is Victorian, she explains: “So far I’ve got an elephant’s foot, a badger, a monkey, two deer heads, two duck heads, a squirrel, a polecat, a canary, a golden pheasant and about three normal pheasants.”

She starts to get revved up, and grins: “My friend just moved out to Canada, to Salisbury Island– a tiny place in the middle of nowhere. She was out walking and found an antler sticking out of the ground, so she started sweeping it away and it was a whole deer skeleton! She’s going to send it to me and her boyfriend is going to wire it, so it’ll stand up. I’m so excited! I’d love to learn how to do taxidermy if the specimens were totally cleaned out before I got them. I don’t think I could deal with scooping out brains.”

Nina Kate’s company is expanding rapidly. Online demand for her clothes is high, and the cheaper items from her website subsidise the more time-intensive couture pieces. She recently made outfits for a wedding party, including intricately-patterned latex kimonos for the bride and groom. “I really want to do another wedding,” she says. “They’re great because outfit-wise you can throw common sense out the window!”

She’s also made a pair of trousers for Billy Idol’s guitarist, Steve Stevens, and has kitted out Bianca Beauchamp with latex outfits. But she’s got her eye on other people. “I’d like to put Kat Von D in low-rise trousers with laces across the front, and a top with loads of appliqué on it – decoration from one material sewn over the other. But I’d also like to see her in one of my crazy costumes with really high necks and feathers. I’d love to dress Jessica Alba or Kelly Brook because I think my clothes work wellon curvy people. I like the idea of the Queen
wearing one of my outfits, too!”

Nina Kate is quietly and realistically ambitious. In a few years she’s single-handedly built her company into one of the most successful fetish houses in the UK. I ask her what’s next, and she smiles. “I’d just like to be able to buy a house, or maybe move to LA. It depends on how my husband’s band do, but it’s all exciting.”

A master of the understatement, we’re expecting big things of Nina Kate in the next few years. I ask her if the world would be a better place if people walked the streets in peacock feather skirts and skull-strewn wigs. She smiles. “Yes, of course.” Then she shakes her head. “But you know, I work at home in my pyjamas like other people. Still, it’s a fantasy.”