Photography by BENEDICT CAMPBELL
Courtesy of WHITAKER MALEM
Patrick Whitaker and Keir Malem have spent four decades tracing the intimate contours of the physical self. Few collaborations have shaped the language of the human form in contemporary art and fashion as distinctively as theirs. As partners in life and art, the duo has built a singular practice rooted in the act of bodycasting—capturing living bodies in leather, fiberglass, and sculptural forms that hover between armor and second skin. Their work has evolved through years of craft, intuition, and selective technology into a substantial oeuvre. Their pieces have appeared on runways, in blockbuster films, at the Met Gala, and in gallery contexts, yet they retain the quiet charge of something made by hand, close to the body, and close to each other.
A Whitaker Malem object is never merely a garment or a sculpture; it is a translation—sometimes tender, sometimes assertive—of flesh into form. Over years of working with actors, pop stars, and fellow artists, they have navigated the tension between private vulnerability and public spectacle, always returning to the body as both material and meaning. In this conversation with hube, the duo opens up about symmetry and imperfection, the evolving politics of visibility, time, and the long, negotiated harmony of their shared creative life.
hube: The body in your practice is not represented but directly captured, almost “taken” from reality. How has your understanding of the body changed through this act of direct translation—from living presence into physical trace?
Keir Malem: When you capture a body, you get a static thing. But the body is always moving, it’s impossible to keep it still, even if you try. So it’s a kind of transitional act. Sometimes we use body scans of people—more often for movies—but most of the time, the body image comes out of our imaginations.
Patrick Whitaker: It comes back to the fact that we’ve been doing this a long time. Originally, we started using a vintage tailor dummy, a really beautiful one. Then, when it eventually collapsed—because it was made from papier-mâché, and we were wet-molding leather over it—we were forced to create our own version by making a mold from it. This was around forty years ago, well before body scanning or other technologies.
In a photo, the body is static, and you can imagine the movement—though good photos of people in action or doing sports capture it. When you’re making something that’s going to be worn or that represents the body, you’re looking for an idealised moment. But then it becomes animated once it’s on a living body, and it’s hard to predict in what way. When we make something, it really gets an additional life when it goes to the next stage—when it’s worn or photographed. That’s always fascinating to us, especially when we are working with body scans. They capture a moment, like a photo—but even with that technique, we always refine the result quite a lot, literally by hand. We’ve done some digital editing, but it’s never entirely satisfactory. All of these things look quite different when you see them in reality, in 3D.
