“Hmm … I’ll have what she’s having,” I thought last week as I watched the Saint Laurent spring runway show online, the model’s ball-bearing hips sheathed in a black latex bodysuit.

A true believer, I lost no time tracking down its slick approximation, zipping myself into it and styling it with some vintage Chanel tweeds.

When I worked up the nerve to wear it, reactions were swift and incisive. “Is it Wang?” a friend asked brightly. “Vuitton?” another inquired.

As is happened, I had plucked that much-coveted swathe of rubber-and-raunch straight off the rack at Purple Passion, a cavelike emporium in Chelsea trading in leather-wrapped paddles, harnesses, spiked chokers and demonic masks that might have wandered off the set of “Eyes Wide Shut.”

Nice way to add a little kick to a sadly fatigued wardrobe, I assured myself as I made my selection.

This has been a year, after all, in which sex-shop chic infiltrated the runways, asserting its status as a kind of kinky perma trend, one that, like nautical stripes or safari suits, has woven itself inextricably into the fabric of fashion.

Lightly veiled, domesticated variations on fetish wear emerged last September on the spring 2016 runways of unlikely designers like Carolina Herrera, where a faintly recognizable harness embellished an otherwise pristine white dress, and Marissa Webb, who showed an airy spring dress with a curious hybrid of leather porn-shop harness and fishing vest.

Ms. Webb likes to wear that harness herself, usually over a black blazer. “But here’s to anyone who wants to wear it over nothing at all,” she said.

Kink returned in force for fall 2016 shows this year, with lace-up corsets, wet-look bodysuits and leggings, corsets, fishnet hose and pole-dancing pumps shimmying their way into the collections of Alexander Wang, Hood by Air, Prada, Balmain, Marc Jacobs and Vetements, to name but an influential few.

Ms. Webb incorporated a sex-shop reference in high-waist trousers that were nipped at the midsection for a corseted effect. Subtly or overtly, she said, “a fetish influence is always part of fashion.”

Designers have repeatedly gone back to that once-forbidden well, with Mr. Jacobs in particular revisiting a theme he explored most memorably in his fall 2011 collection for Louis Vuitton.

“I wanted severity and fetish,” Mr. Jacobs said at that time of his strokeable fur purses, patent-leather bustiers and masks. His aim was to break down and recombine hallowed dress codes and “make them a bit caricature.”

In other, more repressive times, Mr. Jacobs’s steamy little numbers may have made some people squirm. Today they are so deeply embedded in the popular culture that they have been all but stripped of their dark associations.

So inured have consumers become, said Robbie Sinclair, the women’s wear editor of the New York trend-forecasting service WGSN, “that when people see a rubber pencil skirt, nobody bats an eyelid.” Indeed, early adopters have incorporated the look into their daily arsenal of chic.

“Women are more aware than ever of the implications of an O-ring, leather harness choker necklaces, vinyl skirt or platform boots,” said Connie Wang, the fashion features director of Refinery29, a shopping site that recently offered a pair of velvet bondage cuffs. If customers are for the most part unfazed, Ms. Wang said that it is because “porn and its related aesthetic have become mainstream, full stop.”

The trend’s subversive allure was certainly not lost on the college-age women who thronged the Pink Pussycat in Greenwich Village on a recent Sunday, raiding tables and shelves piled with fishnet bodysuits, filigreed harnesses, rhinestone-covered shackles and strap-on accessories in 50 shades of pink.

Dressing like a dominatrix may seem pretty innocuous to worshipers at the altar of pop idols like Kim Kardashian, who has embraced peach-tone latex as cocktail attire; Rita Ora, who flaunted her curves in sickly pink latex; or Taylor Swift, who, for the filming last year of “Bad Blood,” her racy girl-power music video, laced herself into a clam-colored latex corset from a high-end Los Angeles sex shop.

Not everyone, of course, is entirely on board. When Ms. Swift was photographed last summer wearing a harness to a Hollywood lunch, Twitter virtually imploded, reactions varying from sputtering disdain to unconcealed hostility. Nonetheless, the look is a commonplace, so ubiquitous that less-worldly consumers may well be challenged to pinpoint its ultimate source.

For many young women, the sex-shop look has become a fashion fallback, “a kind of classic,” said David Wolfe, a creative director of the Doneger Group, the New York trend forecasting firm. Some retreat routinely to the reassuring familiarity of fishnet hose, tight T-shirts and pole-dancing shoes, he pointed out, but are rarely aware of their lineage.

“People only get as far back as tracing this to rock ’n’ roll,” Mr. Wolfe said. “They don’t realize that the rock ’n’ roll look had had its roots in a period when rock people started raiding porn shops for their wardrobes.”

He was referring to the trend’s historical antecedents in the fetish emporiums of London’s seamier back streets, stores that were mined by the original punkers for their strappy bondage trousers, spiky leather chokers, strap-festooned trousers and schoolgirl plaid skirts.

And that’s to say nothing of Madonna, who in earlier career incarnations embraced fetish-wear as a second skin, contributing immeasurably to the steady erosion of boundaries between fashion and fetishism.

Over the years sex-shop chic has made regular incursions into conventional wardrobes, in the form of catsuits, rump-clutching lace and leather trousers and stiletto-heel, thigh-high boots.

“Whether they’re inspired by a runway show being live-streamed or someone’s Instagram feed, a much higher number of people are feeling inspired to try something more daring,” said Alexandra Popa, the founder of Bordelle, a London lingerie shop and website with a brisk business in dog-collar chokers.

Fashion marketers have traded on that fascination, construction sites plastered with images of models in tie-me-up tops (IRO) and chains (Alexander Wang). This year Diesel saw fit to introduce its underwear campaign online on Pornhub/YouPorn, as part of its foray into digital advertising.

Television, too, has lately exploited the intrigue of latex and leather. Such trappings feature in “Billions,“ a Showtime drama in which Paul Giamatti as the United States attorney battling Wall Street corruption engages with his wife (Maggie Siff) in BDSM role-play.

Others mine the style for laughs, as did Vogue, in its February issue, with a leather-clad Ben Stiller, the hapless antihero of “Zoolander 2,” saddled up and propped on all fours as a camera-toting Penélope Cruz (the film’s sharp-eyed investigator) looked on.

Sure, it was all in good fun, yet another indication that, among a large segment of the population, such instances of erotic aggression have been rendered as tame as a terrier. Watered-down versions of raunch wear are standard issue at the mall. Seen at stores like Hot Topic or Forever 21, often in tones of mint or pink, “they look wearable,” said Mr. Sinclair, the trend forecaster. “Pastel tints give them a more commercial vibe.”

Still, when style-world influencers insist on authenticity (the kink-wear equivalent of a Perfecto biker jacket), many now turn to naughty lingerie boutiques, hard-core leather outlets and upscale fetish specialists like Fleet Ilya, Atsuko Kudo and Chromat for their vinyl skirts, cage petticoats, bondage bras and PVC leggings.

“Harnesses are probably our biggest sellers,” said Max Gregory, the owner of the Leather Man, the venerable sex shop on Christopher Street. “A lot of women, especially models and stylists, come in and put them with whatever they’re wearing.”

“People will wear the restraint cuffs as a fashion piece,” he said. Any lingering sense of shame has dissipated along the way.

“Women are incorporating fetish wear into their style in ways that are much more mix-and-match, and less obvious than before,” said Ms. Wang of Refinery29. “They’re pairing their patent thigh-highs with oversize sweatshirts and frowzy dresses.”

At the Tic Tac Toe, the Pink Pussycat’s sister store on West Fourth Street, jeweled handcuffs, pastel tutus and black patent pumps perched on four-inch platform soles attract a mostly female weekend clientele, a sales clerk said.

Among the shop’s more eye-catching attractions last week was a pair of thigh-high red vinyl boots, ringers for those that stalked the Dior runway last spring, but at $99, a bargain for sure.

Reader, I bought them.