Male Wet Molded Leather Top

Category: Apparel

This is a wet molded leather top using cowhide leather. I used medical grade plaster casting bandages on the model’s front and back to create the mold. This mold acts as a stamp once you place the wet leather into it. There is a process of placing sand into the molds that is replaced over a couple days as well as adjusting parts of the mold by hand as it sits overtime. Once the mold is ready then it is cut into the design wanted following hand dyeing and adding hardware. This process takes weeks to do properly, but so worth the end result. The models I used originally for casting said it feels so strange to breathe into the molds when wearing their own bodies, and that it also feels like armor. I love that it is a documentation of a person’s body at a particular time of their life so even as time progresses these molds will always stay true to their original form without losing shape.