Super talent and businesswoman Kylie Jenner covers the August 2020 issue of Vogue Hong Kong. Jenner is styled by Jill Jacobs in the latex luxury YSL AW2020 collection.
Jenner sports a pure white manicure, which adds a somewhat futuristic look, mixed with the latex.
“I treated latex as the new denim,” stated designer Anthony Vaccarello said backstage after the FW 2020 show. “It’s a material that I found interesting as it could be effortless to use. It was treated as a fabric and I reproduced some of the iconic pieces from the Saint Laurent heritage. Usually it looks cheap with a a plastic look, so I wanted to give it a new luxury life. The collection was Sєxy because Monsieur Yves Saint Laurent was making women Sєxy, I kept this concept by modernizing it.”
The BBC wrote about the rise of natural rubber latex and its move away from censorship and into luxury fashion’s center stage limelight. Kim Kardashian, Kylie’s sister, has a voracious appreciation for Balmain’s latex dresses and pants.
Though natural rubber latex has come to be ᴀssociated with futurism and technology, its origins are ancient and organic. Latex is a milky fluid that oozes from over 20,000 plant species after tissue injury. The sap-like substance, which coagulates and hardens to form an elastic and waterproof mᴀss, is tapped by making careful incisions with small blades. The New York-based latex designer known as The Baroness tells BBC Designed: “People often mistake latex for PVC, and think of it as shiny, тιԍнт, Sєxy and cheap. But natural rubber latex is completely vegan, sustainable, fragile and difficult to work with”.