The latex designer chosen by Rick Owens: CAL (@straytukay)
A massive expansion that shook the Paris catwalk
At the 2024 Rick Owens (@rickowensonline) Autumn/Winter ‘Porterville’ collection show, a bizarre shape appeared on the catwalk that instantly captivated the audience.
The star of the show was a pair of inflatable boots that made the models’ legs appear enormously swollen, resembling a spacesuit or a futuristic architectural structure. This radical silhouette, which caught the eye of avant-garde fashion maestro Rick Owens, was unveiled for the first time at an official event through a collaboration with London-based designer CAL (@straytukay).
The origins of CAL, a young man who dreamed of becoming an alchemist
CAL’s fashion journey, characterised by his creation of bizarre garments, bears more resemblance to a scientist’s laboratory than a traditional tailor’s workshop. A British native who studied menswear at the world-renowned fashion institution Central Saint Martins, he felt a profound boredom with the conventional tailoring methods of cutting and sewing fabric from his school days.
Before becoming captivated by latex, his early work consisted mainly of experiments involving everyday ready-to-wear items or industrial materials such as plastic and vinyl. He was fascinated by the strange distortions that occurred when objects were placed inside transparent vinyl and ‘vacuum-compressed’. Then, suddenly, he felt a desire to extend this compression to the ‘human body’, and fatefully encountered ‘latex’—a material that offers immense elasticity whilst allowing for the most perfect control over the body’s curves.
By erasing the material’s clichéd fetishistic image and focusing solely on its sculptural potential—how its form changes in response to physical pressure—his unique latex universe began.
Variable sculptures shaped by air and pressure
CAL’s work does not merely stop at unique silhouettes. He employs methods of either injecting air into the flexible material of latex or, conversely, creating a vacuum to make it cling tightly to the body. This is an experiment in the mutability of fashion, where the volume of the garment and the tension of its surface change moment by moment in response to shifts in air pressure.
Through the contrasting physical phenomena of expansion and compression, his work reshapes the wearer’s body into entirely new forms; it is closer to kinetic sculpture utilising the human body than to mere clothing.
Under his hands, latex is reinterpreted from a strictly structural perspective. When perfectly clinging to the skin under vacuum, it lays bare the human muscles and skeleton in their raw state; when inflated with air, it distorts the body’s natural proportions to create geometric volumes.
It presents a futuristic anthropometry in which the body’s contours are not followed by the garment, but rather the body’s boundaries are redefined by the pressure exerted by the garment.
The birth of a new genre attracting the attention of high fashion
Following the successful collaboration with Rick Owens, the fashion world became deeply captivated by the relationship between materiality and the body demonstrated by CAL. This is because his work went beyond visual impact to spark a fresh discourse on how the ‘act of wearing’ can interact with space and atmospheric pressure.
His unique curation, which creates a massive aura using nothing but the volume of air without any rigid structures, clearly illustrates the avant-garde future that luxury fashion must embrace.
