Latex is one of the oldest materials in human use. The ancient civilisations of Mesoamerica extracted it from the Hevea brasiliensis tree, shaping it into balls, waterproof vessels, and ceremonial objects long before European contact. For most of its history, it was a practical material: elastic, waterproof, durable, resistant to almost everything. It took centuries, and a particular kind of creative ambition, for fashion to notice what it could actually do.
That ambition arrived in waves. Each one moved latex further from utility and closer to culture.
How latex reached the runway
The first serious intersection of latex and fashion came not from couture but from subculture, and then from one moment of mainstream crossover that changed the material's trajectory entirely.
In 1974, Vivienne Westwood opened SEX on the Kings Road in London with Malcolm McLaren. The shop introduced latex and rubber into the vocabulary of street dress, not as erotica but as provocation, as anti-establishment material, as the texture of punk before punk had a name. Westwood understood that the surface of a garment carried meaning. Latex, with its high shine and its refusal to behave like anything else, was the right surface for the argument she was making.
The runway followed. In the 1980s and 1990s, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler brought latex into their collections as a structural tool. The interest was not in the body it revealed but in the silhouette it could hold. Latex did not drape. It formed. It could be moulded, sealed, constructed into shapes that woven fabric could not sustain. Gaultier and Mugler were asking a design question, not a subcultural one, and latex answered it.
A parallel moment had already happened in 1967. John Sutcliffe, founder of the London label Atom Age, designed the catsuit worn by Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in The Avengers. It was the first time most people had seen latex on a mainstream television screen, and it had nothing to do with subculture. It was elegant, functional, and completely new. Rigg wore it as a woman who could do anything. The garment told you that before she moved.
Explore the latex vests and tank tops in the HARRI London collection, or the sculptural dresses that carry this lineage forward.
The 2000s and the red carpet moment
By the 2000s, latex had made its way onto red carpets and into mainstream fashion consciousness. Celebrities began choosing it as a signal of boldness, of willingness to occupy space, of a relationship with fashion that went beyond the conventional. The material's properties, its high-gloss surface, its ability to catch light, its sculptural tension, made it read differently on camera than anything woven or draped. It demanded attention without asking for it.
By 2026, latex had moved from the fringes into what commentators were calling the mainstream of loud luxury, present across runways in gathered, ruched, and structured forms that would have been technically impossible a decade earlier. The material had completed a long journey. But the most significant contribution to that journey had already happened in London, three years earlier, on a red carpet at the O2 Arena.
What HARRI London did differently
HARRI London was not interested in latex as surface. The label, founded by designer Harri KS and based in Smithfield, London, approached the material as a structural proposition from the beginning. The question was not what latex looked like. It was what latex made possible.
The answer was inflation. Air, sealed inside latex panels, creates volume independent of the body underneath. The garment produces its own geometry. It does not follow the figure: it proposes a new one. Shoulders that extend beyond the shoulder. Legs that exist in their own plane. A silhouette that is entirely the designer's construction, built from a material that seals, holds pressure, and moves with the wearer without losing its form.
This was the idea behind the 2020 graduate collection, presented at the London College of Fashion, that stopped the industry. The inflatable latex trousers that circulated globally under the phrase "Let's Put Him in a Vase" were not a provocation for its own sake. They were the answer to a design question: what does clothing look like when it is no longer trying to follow the body?
The inflatable clothing collection at HARRI London includes the trousers, skirts, and jackets built on that founding logic. The About HARRI London page sets out the design philosophy in full.
BFC NEWGEN recognition followed. So did commissions, editorial features, and a growing international audience for a label that had identified something specific: that latex, used as a construction material rather than a surface treatment, could produce garments unlike anything else in fashion.
Sam Smith and the BRIT Awards, 2023
In February 2023, stylist Ben Reardon contacted HARRI London on behalf of Sam Smith ahead of the BRIT Awards red carpet. Ben had seen the SS23 London Fashion Week show and wanted a bespoke look. HARRI London took the commission. What followed was one week of work, four nights without sleep, everything handmade in the studio at Smithfield.
The look Sam Smith wore, an inflatable black latex suit with dramatically squared shoulders and inflated sleeves and legs, generated approximately 2 billion impressions and became the most talked-about red carpet moment of 2023. WWD reached 10 million views within 24 hours. Every major fashion publication covered it. It appeared on American late night television. The total reach, for a garment made by hand in seven days in a London studio, was unlike anything the label had encountered before.
The full story of the BRIT Awards commission is documented on the Journals blog. What the moment confirmed, at a scale that could not be argued with, was that latex handled as sculpture rather than spectacle operates at the highest level of mainstream cultural visibility. The material's journey from Mesoamerica to Vivienne Westwood's Kings Road shop to the BRIT Awards red carpet had a logic to it. HARRI London was the point at which that logic became undeniable.
Where latex fashion is in 2026
Latex is now a mainstream fashion material. That is not a trend observation: it is the settled position of a material that has completed its cultural journey from practical substance to subcultural signal to runway presence to everyday wardrobe consideration. The question for any designer working with it now is not whether to use latex but what to do with it.
HARRI London's answer continues to be structural. The MuseumWear collection, launched at the Barbican during London Fashion Week SS26, brings latex into everyday wear for creative professionals: latex shirts, latex pleated trousers, latex as one material among several in a wardrobe built around design intelligence rather than occasion. The trousers collection spans deflated, wide leg, and structured silhouettes, each carrying the logic of the label's founding proposition.
Natural latex, sourced responsibly and handmade in London, remains the foundation. The label uses latex because of what it can do structurally, not because of what it signals culturally. That distinction is the one that has always separated HARRI London's work from the broader category it now occupies.
Latex arrived in fashion through provocation and subculture. It stayed because designers found out what it could actually build. HARRI London is one of the clearest examples of what that building looks like: inflatable volume, sculptural form, garments that reshape the figure rather than follow it, made by hand in a London studio, worn on the most visible stages in the world.
Discover the full HARRI London collection or explore the latex shirts as a starting point.
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Cover Image by Arthur Finch, Image 1 by Anett Posalak, Image 2 by Cieran Jay, Image 3 by BBC, Image 4, 5 & 6 by Alexis White
