These body-bending shapes necessitated a bit of boundary pushing when it comes to textiles. Rubber, at first glance, is an untraditional material for a couture atelier, though its very nature prevents it from being treated traditionally. “Latex can’t be sewn like cloth fabric,” Laura Pulice, founder and designer of VEX Clothing—whose latex work has been worn by Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, and Kim Kardashian—says. “Each seam is cut flat and hand-glued, panel by panel, closer to fine leatherwork than to conventional dressmaking.”
“There’s no mass-producing it, no shortcuts,” Pulice added. “That hand-labor, one-at-a-time, built-to-a-single-body process is the literal definition of couture in my mind.”
Different engineering techniques can create ruching, texture, marbling, and custom colors—the latter of which is particularly special. “Latex takes pigment like nothing else,” adds Pulice. When Helmut Lang debuted four rubber dresses for his fall 1995 collection, the pieces almost immediately became a form of demi-couture: It was never mass-produced, and only 99 were made. (Thierry Mugler and Alexander McQueen were ’90s adapters of the once-fetishistic material, too.) Rubber is one of the only dress materials whose process hasn’t been uber-modernized over the last 30 years.
Rick Owens, always one for textile engineering, tapped London-based Florence Druart, designer of Torture Garden Latex, for his recent spring 2027 menswear show. Owens had envisioned a cape for which he needed a heavy-gauge rubber. “I have noticed that [latex] can be spotted almost every season on the runway these days whilst it was just a handful of times in the past and rather than just a styling element it has now fully entered the space,” says Druart. The same year that Lang’s rubber dress hit the runway, The New Yorker declared that Lang’s “typically minimal approach mutes the sexual implications of the rubber,” while Lang himself told the magazine that the sexual association “has almost disappeared—until you wear it.” While rubber might not have become entirely de-fetishized over the past three decades (see: John Galliano’s fall 2003 “Hardcore (Fetish and Japan)” collection for Dior), the material’s more mainstream presence is approaching it now. Couture loves a finicky material, and the modern runway has never offered a bigger stage.
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