Latex clothing

Latex rubber is used in many types of clothing. Rubber has traditionally been used in protective clothing, including gas masks and Wellington boots. Rubber is now generally being replaced in these application by plastics. Mackintoshes have traditionally been made from rubberized cloth.

Latex rubber as a clothing material is common in fetish fashion and among BDSM practitioners, and is often seen worn at fetish clubs. Latex is sometimes also used by couturiers for its dramatic appearance. Latex clothing tends to be skin-tight. There are several magazines dedicated to the use and wearing of it. Less commonly, latex clothing can be loose-fitting.

There are a handful of companies around the world which manufacture latex rated as suitable for contact with human skin. These firms supply sheet (in the vast majority) to a larger number of smaller fashion clothing companies. In the past, some marketplaces suffered from de facto monopoly supply conditions, where a sheet supplier could impose restrictive ordering requirements. Only being able to order half-kilometre long batches of sheet in the colour and thickness they wanted, meant that designers and clothing producers often had to co-operate, or face long delays in supplying their customers, if they wanted to be in the rubber clothing business.

Since 2000, however, the sheet market has been exposed to competition from international suppliers courtesy of the Internet. This has produced an explosion in cottage industry scale latex fetish clothing manufacturers.

Latex sheet-based clothing is constructed by a three-stage process. First a pattern for a specific garment is selected, and adjusted carefully to suit the measurements supplied by the customer. Then the sheet latex is cut out on a flat board, by hand: lastly latex glue (generally rubber cement solvent-based adhesives) is used to join seams together. Skilled latex makers can build a stocking, shaped to match the contours of a specific person's leg, made from latex only 0.2 mm thick, in under an hour. It is possible to use water-based glues such as Copydex to make latex clothes; however, the long-term durability of items made this way is somewhat dubious.

...
Wikipedia