Patrick Whitaker and Keir Malem are a design duo based in Dalston, east London, who create unique and largely one-off wearable leather body sculptures.

They started out in the late 1980s with fashion-focused pieces for a few shops, but they now produce commission-led, mainly one-off pieces for film, red carpet and stage wear.

The pair met in the mid-’80s, first forming a personal relationship and then deciding to work together. The professional collaboration began when Keir assisted Patrick with his St Martin’s graduate fashion collection (1987), where the foundations of what became their signature method of moulded leather garments were set in motion.

They work as a team, both drawing and designing as well as splitting their manufact-

Patrick reveals that he and Keir knew about the Mandrake from doing a couple of shoots there, one of which was for Portuguese Vogue with [American singer and rapper] Brooke Candy.

“There is an amazing penthouse with a bed that comfortably fits ten people. They do rope-tying talks — kooky events that are sex positive.

“It’s not a hetero-normative environment but is run by this great guy, Rami Fustok, as a sex positive place. The gay scene is dying — young people don’t want to just be categorised as gay.”

WM philosophy tunes into this orientation: their work questions identity and sexuality through creating idealised versions.

Updating an old leather-moulding method

They developed their own technique of moulding leather into body sculpture by soaking the leather in vegetable dyes, and then wet-moulding it onto a mannequin.

MAKING Butterfly Bustier for singer Katy Perry in the WM studio (photo: Jonathan Glynn Smith)

Explains Patrick: “The wet moulding was an act of desperation: leather was plunged into warm water to soften it in a similar kind of method employed by potters, who in fact refer to it as making the clay leather-like.

[Editor’s note: French version of this process is cuir builli (boiled leather). It was first used in the Middle Ages to preserve the moulded shape of leather when it dried and hardened.]

“To create the tension,” adds Patrick, “our process relies both on the wet moulding and the seaming; it is a random process.”

Whitaker and Malem refer to themselves as “pop artisans”, and the artisanal stitching they employ to tailor their garments around the body certainly results in a more handcrafted couture look.

Their work is like no other, so is instantly recognisable. But they are adamant they are not a brand; they do not dilute their art into consumer multiples.

WM have also defied the fashion norms of two collections a year, finding that process too stressful and demanding, not to mention hugely expensive. They have only shown a collection on the London Fashion Week catwalk once — in 1991.

Inspired by Thierry Mugler’s breastplates

As admirers of the legendary Thierry Mugler, they absorbed his ideas as a starting point, but then departed, establishing their own idiosyncratic leather ‘sexed body’ sculptures.

This is a path taken by a lot of artists, who begin by following a school or movement and then go on to refine those ideas into their own oeuvre, until they become the leading exponents of that movement.

Whitaker Malem’s ideas both follow on from the laced leather jackets Azzedine Alaïa created and extend the fibreglass breastplates created by Mugler.