There’s a charge in the air when José Ramiro steps in front of Jack Rainbow’s lens. The editorial is less about posing and more about staging masculinity itself, a play in leather straps, heavy boots, and the unapologetic wink of jockstrap culture. It’s impossible not to trace the lineage straight back to Tom of Finland, whose illustrations carved an erotic blueprint for queer men long before glossy magazines were ready to give it space. What Rainbow does here is not mimicry but translation, refracting the history of leather daddy archetypes into a contemporary moment that feels both mischievous and reverent.
José carries it well. He isn’t just a model wearing clothes; he’s performing a lineage of desire. His body reads as both athlete and icon, his gaze at once daring and generous. There’s a sincerity in how he embraces the exaggerated masculinity leather culture offers. It’s camp, yes, but also vulnerable. That paradox is what makes the imagery sing.
Rainbow, true to his reputation, resists soft focus or safe framing. His photography has always been about collision: sex meeting style, humor brushing against reverence. He captures José not as an object but as a collaborator, a co-author of this performance. The lighting is stark, almost theatrical, as if every shadow on José’s skin is an intentional character note. Rainbow knows his references—Tom of Finland, queer zines of the seventies, the coded language of leather clubs, and he threads them into photographs that feel alive, not archived.
For those who only know José from commercial campaigns, this editorial feels like a revelation. It shows him not as a mannequin but as a provocateur, willing to step into the history of queer performance and bring it forward with his own muscle, sweat, and smirk. The editorial isn’t nostalgia. It’s an assertion: that the performance of masculinity, exaggerated and adorned, belongs to queer men as much as it ever did to straight culture’s stoic cowboys or iron-jawed action stars.
Jack Rainbow and José Ramiro remind us that menswear is not just fabric and fit. It’s theater. It’s costume. It’s a love letter to the men who came before, drawn in pencil and leather, and to the men still brave enough to put it all on the page.
