Soft armour, pert nipples: how London design team made Kim Kardashian’s Met Gala breastplate | Met Gala 2026
A.At Monday’s Met Gala, it inevitably fell to Kim Kardashian to deliver the biggest shocker of the night. One of the few celebrities to directly interpret the “fashion is art” dress code, which focuses on the dressed and undressed human body as the through line in many works of art, she has decided to abandon her usual role as a walking billboard for a major fashion house and instead arrive with an orange fiberglass chest plate created by a small art duo in east London and a car garage in Kent.
“Good art should start the conversation, and Kim did just that,” says Patrick Whitaker, 61, one half of the Whitaker Malem design company, which made the breastplate just weeks before the premiere. “He was very clear that he wanted a chest plate, he was very clear about the bodywork of the car. And I think he was really nervous. He understands the competition.”
She also learned from Anna Wintour that five other people are wearing breastplates, including her half-sisters Kylie and Kendall Jenner. Soft armor and flashy nipples may have been the night’s themes, but Whitaker says wearing it was still a risky proposition for someone so famous.
The pair, who spoke at the home she shares with partner Keir Malem, 60, are still recovering from watching the premiere live. “We went to bed at 5 a.m. Surprisingly boring, right? A bit of The Hunger Games,” Whitaker says.
The breastplate was a three-way collaboration between the duo, British pop artist Allen Jones and visual artist Nadia Lee Cohen (a frequent Kardashian collaborator). During the night, Kardashian attended the premiere with Jones.
Jones’s fetishistic furniture creations of topless women, a series that ran from the early ’80s to 2015, sparked second-wave feminist outrage. Yet it continues to permeate and often influence the fashion industry, from Thierry Mugler’s armored silhouettes to the Pirelli calendar and now the Met Gala’s steps.
The collaboration began in early April after Whitaker and Malem received a call from Kardashian directly asking if they could prepare something for the premiere. “We were just talking about how tight her body was and she was showing me her breasts on the video call while Keir and his dad were eating dinner in the background,” she says during a video call from their seaside home in Kent.
The following week, Kardashian flew to the United Kingdom and drove to Allen’s home in Oxfordshire, where “one of the body models was crammed into the trunk like a Volvo,” Whitaker said. The breastplate was cast by Whitaker Malem from an original mold derived from Jones’s 1969 Hatstand sculpture, to which a hand-painted leather skirt was added. She had tried various fiberglass molds, and remarkably, the waist and top fit. “We’ve never seen the Allen Jones breastplate fit anyone so well,” says Whitaker. “They are not actually designed to be worn.” Kardashian made several trips to east London to try on the breastplate.
Eventually Lydd was painted orange by Martyn Smith, who runs body shop MPS Body and Paint in Kent. “It consisted of several layers, so the primers, stoppers and final paint were solvent-based and finished with a gloss lacquer,” he said. “It took all day, but it turned out very well. I was still worried. I’m not a follower of Kim Kardashian or fashion, but I knew she’d be showing up at a big event,” she says. “Martyn builds our Jag, so we know he’s reliable,” says Whitaker.
Whitaker and Malem founded design practices Whitaker Malem Neither the artists nor the designers prefer the term “pop artisan” and they produce about 12 garments a year, starting from a few thousand per piece. They work primarily with leather and have perfected the method of wet molding and shaping it for clothing. This process, which is done using block molds, is very similar to shoe and hat making.
The chest plate is actually made of a type of fiberglass called glass-reinforced plastic. The breastplate weighed as much as a sack of flour, and Kardashian was naked underneath.
The finished piece was assembled a few days before the premiere by “a poor, flustered chap who flew first class from Los Angeles to pick up the piece, then turned tail, returned to Heathrow, and flew back to New York at seven o’clock.” The chest armor, which could not be reserved for clothing because it “had no name”, was placed in the overhead locker.
Whitaker was a student at St Martin’s when he met Malem, who was working in the theater at the time. They occasionally showed at fashion weeks, but couldn’t focus on their leather business until they purchased one of their Bros jackets in the late 1980s. They’ve dressed everyone from Cher to Bella Hadid and worked with numerous designers including Tommy Hilfiger and Burberry.
The biggest work for designers has been in the film industry. The gilded breastplate and wing bustier created at Givenchy for Lee McQueen led to them making Brad Pitt’s skirt in Troy and Wonder Woman’s suit in the 2009 film; he also made many Bond girl costumes, including the white belt Halle Berry wore in Die Another Day, which now hangs on the wall of their home. Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft suit was made using materials from nearby Ridley Road in Dalston. Hollywood work was lucrative, but he rarely got credit. “Some of the costume designers bought these pieces off the rack and were acting like they designed them.”
After the complex task of creating Christian Bale’s batsuit made of molded urethane, carbon fiber and mesh, they discovered the “amazing game of body scanning.” To create the form, it is produced on a 3D printer, then machined by hand using a sharp knife, then draped over leather using a wet molding process.
Malem says Jones received a lot of criticism for her work, but she wisely turned that around with Kardashian. “Instead of the usual girl being put on the car, he wanted to put the car on the girl.”
