With Fetish Lady, Banksy infiltrates the genteel world of classical portraiture and laces it with delicious subversion. The image mimics a Rococo-style painting—an aristocratic woman posed with genteel grace against a pastoral backdrop, complete with satin dress and demure hands. But the elegance screeches to a halt at her face: she’s wearing a shiny black gimp mask, complete with zipper mouth and leather collar.

The tension between 18th-century refinement and 21st-century kink is jarring, hilarious, and uncomfortably revealing. Banksy does not just deface tradition: he repurposes it, highlighting the hypocrisies and buried desires beneath polished surfaces. The gilded frame, left intact, only intensifies the joke: it’s not just the painting that’s bound: it’s our expectations of class, propriety, and taste.

Fetish Lady is a masterclass in aesthetic sabotage, a cheeky critique of both repression and the art world’s fetish for “the classic.” Banksy reminds us that even the most genteel facades may be stitched over something wilder.