CONDOM COUTURE

Unused condoms become wearable sculptures.

Between skin and protection, intimacy takes public form.

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Condom Couture transforms unused condoms rejected by industrial quality control into wearable sculptures. Dyed, folded, stretched, and assembled by hand, latex becomes a textile language: repetition creates volume, translucency holds light, and an object associated with intimacy takes public form.

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Developed since the 1990s, the collection brings beauty into contact with protection, vulnerability, desire, and bodily autonomy. Through the tension between the delicacy of latex and the density of its accumulation, each work invites viewers to reconsider a familiar material and the meanings it carries. Sexuality, HIV, stigma, human rights, and environmental care become part of the same field of artistic inquiry.

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Beyond exhibitions, Condom Couture has become a reference for students, educators, and researchers, inspiring monographs, undergraduate final projects, and classroom investigations. The work has been incorporated into teaching in South Africa and, at UCLA, has been the focus of the Fiat Lux seminar “Condom Couture: Arts Activism of Adriana Bertini,” with Professor David Gere.

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Across museums, universities, and community settings, the collection connects material experimentation with dialogue and shared knowledge. A small object of protection becomes a starting point for thinking about bodies, rights, and collective care.