LONDON — Not all superheroes wear capes. And none wear satin tights or stretch nylon today. The modern crime fighter favors bespoke leather, often a little kinky, frequently handmade by a pair of ex-club kids.
Patrick Whitaker and Keir Malem, both 57, founded Whitaker Malem, their leather specialty label, in 1988. They had begun dating a few years earlier, while Mr. Whitaker was studying at Central Saint Martins and fashion students were using discos as much as their college assignments to experiment with style. Nightlife was the social media of the day.
Fashion buyers were enthusiastic about Mr. Whitaker’s final student collection, so the two men set up their business — first as a luxury fashion label, then as costumers for music videos, stage and screen. They call themselves “pop artisans” and are celebrated for their distinctive cutting, assemblage and wet molding of raw hides, with custom orders costing an average of 8,000 pounds ($9,270), but specialty film and video creations often commanding much more.
Their work has become part of the canon of pop culture: They created looks for “Aquaman,” Batman in “The Dark Knight,” “Captain America: The First Avenger” and “Wonder Woman.” For the latter, in 2017, they didn’t just create the red, bronze and blue bodysuit for Diana Prince’s alter ego, they clad her Amazon sisters, too.
“We were responsible for 160 costumes,” Mr. Whitaker said. “It took a year. Each project is time consuming. ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’ took four months from first sketch to final suit.”
The pair have collaborated with the celebrated costume designer Kym Barrett on numerous productions, including “Aquaman” and the 2012 sci-fi “Cloud Atlas.”
“I often design costumes on my projects geared towards showcasing their design and construction skills,” Ms. Barrett wrote in an email. “They combine sophisticated technical processes with sensual form, finished with delicate coloring & intricate detail. The pieces are protective, durable for action and incredibly sexy.”
In addition to their Hollywood credits, Whitaker and Malem also work on exhibitions and have collaborated regularly with the British artist Allen Jones, known for his fetishized sculptures of female forms as furniture, and with Caroline Darke, a trustee of the Museum of Leathercraft in Northampton, England, who in 2000 commissioned a dissected male torso piece for the museum’s permanent collection.
“They are incredible innovators as well as total perfectionists,” Ms. Darke said. “I first met them about 40 years ago, when they were developing the art of wet-molding leather for fashion. It had previously only been used for bowls and other vessels, and they took it to extremes, creating modern body forms.”
As Ms. Barrett mentioned, and as Mr. Jones clearly appreciates, the Whitaker Malem leather look isn’t PG-13. In a world where nipples are a social media trigger, Mr. Whitaker and Mr. Malem go big on detail of the areola and belly button. For “The Nudes Room” at the 2020 Christian Louboutin exhibition at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, their mannequins left nothing to the imagination. More explicit: Recent “Phallus Belt” sculptures with priapic elements, which definitely won’t be making it into the final cut of a DC or Marvel movie anytime soon.
“Second Skins”
It’s the promise of sex-positive armor that has brought top-line personalities to Whitaker Malem. Megan Thee Stallion wore a black pierced bodysuit at Glastonbury last year and David LaChapelle photographed Doja Cat in a pink “Labia” bustier (which looked like it sounds) for the artwork of her 2021 “Planet Her” album.
The rapper Ojay Morgan, a.k.a. Zebra Katz, wore a black gladiator-style two-piece outfit on his recent “Less is Moor” tour. “I felt and looked like a god, which was the point,” Mr. Morgan wrote in an email. “They create second skins that make you feel absolutely invincible.”
But then styles suitable for the Coliseum are core products for Whitaker Malem: They made a gilded version for Alexander McQueen’s first Givenchy couture show in 1997 and another for Brad Pitt in “Troy.”
Mr. Whitaker and Mr. Malem live and work in a purpose-built studio in Hackney, a neighborhood in East London, and rarely allow anyone — other than a part-time stylist who recently graduated from Central Saint Martins — to assist in a way that gives access to their full process. While they are happy to talk method, their expertise and artistic eye are intangible parts of the end results.
“We get a 3-D body scan of the actor, then that’s milled out by C.N.C. in a certain density of foam that we like to work with,” Mr. Whitaker said, referring to computer numerical control machining. The men use a blade to refine the foam form before applying the leather using the wet mold process and then allowing it to dry, producing permanent contours in the hide.
“Our fit is 90 percent cutting, 10 percent blocking and wet molding,” Mr. Whitaker said. “No one else can match the way we raw-edge sew.”
Another Universe
Anyone who has tried to put a needle through leather would acknowledge Mr. Whitaker and Mr. Malem’s skills.
“We really are couture,” Mr. Whitaker said. “We do all the dyeing and metallic applications in our studio. I do the sewing, and Keir gilds by hand, the way you would a Georgian mirror. When you get close, it looks more beautiful than silver plating. Silhouette is the most important thing for film, then color and the way light hits it.”
The men were on an academic lecture tour in the United States in early March, talking about their inspirations, collaborations and history, and also detailing how fundamental leather is to their craft. “We use leather because of its inherent qualities,” Mr. Malem said. “We cut it and use the seaming instead of boning to create shape. It gives rigidity, never frays. But the work is intense, and we can only make a dozen high-end one-off pieces a year.”
He said they work only with the shoulder portions of hides, which arrive in their natural biscuit color from their sole supplier.
The men say they haven’t considered vegan alternatives and see no need to do so: “Ninety-nine percent of the world’s leather is a co-product of the meat industry,” Mr. Whitaker said. “Twenty percent of hides from farming are thrown away in the U.S. Nothing we do goes into commercial production. There’s no inventory.”
Early Whitaker Malem designs in perfect condition appear on auction sites from time to time. The online marketplace 1st Dibs recently had a listing for a $750 patent leather waistcoat, but artwork and movie-related pieces regularly sell for much more. In 2021, for example, “Attendant,” a sculpture that they collaborated on with Allan Jones, sold for $64,899 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong.
“I remember seeing our work in action films in the 1990s, and the costume designers claimed they had made them,” Mr. Whitaker said. “But they’d just bought them from a shop we sold at in L.A. Cher and Janet Jackson used to buy them there, too.”
Today, people order pieces directly. When Burberry was dressing Bella Hadid for the 2022 Met Gala in New York, the house’s creative director at the time, Riccardo Tisci, commissioned a leather corset as part of her ensemble. They also have worked with Balenciaga and Charles Jeffrey.
But, “for years, we flew under the radar,” Mr. Whitaker said. “No one was doing what we were doing.” Diversifying from art and fashion into Marvel and DC movies took them into another universe, and onto another level.
While copycats make them bristle, they live for their chosen medium, obsessed with how fashion has impacted movies, citing Paco Rabanne’s work on “Barbarella” in 1968 and Azzedine Alaïa’s outfits for Grace Jones in the 1985 James Bond outing “A View to a Kill” as examples of clothing having star billing.
They still relish dressing Madonna for “Die Another Day” in 2002. “You won’t get a lesbian fencing instructor in a Bond film now,” Mr. Malem said.
Mr. Whitaker said the duo would love “to be working with the contemporary equivalent of Fellini, Pasolini or Ken Russell, but they don’t exist. It’s only the blockbuster movies that can afford to have people like us come in and mess around and do what we do.”
