Rob Meijer
1933 – 1991
Rob Meijer was with his Amsterdam leather store Rob, one of Europe’s pioneering specialists in leather and fetish craftsmanship.
Photo credits
Photo © 1989 JackFritscher.com
Rob Meijer was with his Amsterdam leather store Rob, one of Europe’s pioneering specialists in leather and fetish craftsmanship.
Biography
With the adjoining RoB Gallery, he was a champion of gay emancipation in the Netherlands, including during the HIV/AIDS crisis. The gallery hosted exhibitions by visual artists specializing in homoerotic art.
Interview met Jack Fritscher
On June 21, 1989, Rob Meijer aka Rob of Amsterdam — who died in 1991, age approximately fifty — took time from his busy Wednesday afternoon to sit for a video interview in his office above his flagship RoB of Amsterdam couture shop and art gallery. The designer’s company also had corporate RoB franchises in Paris, London, Zürich, Berlin, Brussels, Manchester, New York, and San Francisco. I had first visited Amsterdam in 1969, rooming wantonly above the Argos Bar, but this was different from the wild 1960s. It was Holland at the height of the AIDS pandemic, two months after Drummer publisher Anthony DeBlase designed the leather pride flag, three months after the death of leather fashion photographer Robert Mapplethorpe who had shot Rob, four months before the earthquake that destroyed the Drummer office, and five months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Everyone was on edge. Turmoil was in the air.
Rob received me and Mark Hemry, my husband and creative partner of then ten years, because we were from Drummer, which was very much a leather fashion magazine. Just two hours before, we San Francisco leathermen had landed at Schiphol Airport. We had been flown in by Roger Earl and Terry LeGrand, the pioneer filmmakers of the 1975 leather classic Born to Raise Hell. In 1988, they had shot their film Men with No Name in the cellar at RoB of Amsterdam and were back for more Dutch S&M. Because they liked how we directed and shot leather features for our Palm Drive Video studio, they had hired us onto their otherwise European film crew as cameramen to do a two-camera shoot for six S&M video features for their Marathon Studio based in Los Angeles. It was Terry who had convinced Rob to sit for our interview, which Mark shot.
So as a journalist, I made Rob our absolutely first stop in Amsterdam.