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Goth Girl In Latex
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There are a handful of companies around the world which manufacture latex rated as suitable for contact with human skin. These firms supply sheet (in the vast majority) to a larger number of smaller fashion clothing companies. In the past, some marketplaces suffered from de facto monopoly supply conditions, where a sheet supplier could impose restrictive ordering requirements. Only being able to order half-kilometre long batches of sheet in the colour and thickness they wanted, meant that designers and clothing producers often had to co-operate, or face long delays in supplying their customers, if they wanted to be in the rubber clothing business.
Since 2000, however, the sheet market has been exposed to competition from international suppliers courtesy of the Internet. This has produced an explosion in cottage industry scale latex fetish clothing manufacturers.
Latex sheet based clothing is constructed by a three-stage process. First a pattern for a specific garment is selected, and adjusted carefully to suit the measurements supplied by the customer. Then the sheet latex is cut out on a flat board, by hand: lastly latex glue is used to join seams together. Skilled latex makers can build a stocking, shaped to match the contours of a specific person's leg, made from latex only 0.2mm thick, in under an hour. It is possible to use water-based glues such as Copydex to make latex clothes; however, the long-term durability of items made this way is somewhat dubious
Latex moulded clothing is produced by dipping a mould into a vat of liquid rubber. This is a more dangerous process than sheet latex construction because the substances that make latex into a liquid and then evaporate off the dipped mould, are toxic. The resulting clothing suffers from some shortcomings when compared with sheet-based items: mostly this is because controlling the thickness of the layer resulting from dipping is very hard, and a variation in thickness equates to a variation in stretchiness. Most moulded items suffer rapid failure for this reason - pull too hard on a thin rubber sheet and it will rip, and the varying thickness of a moulded item makes it hard to guess when too much stress is being applied. Generally, cheaper rubber garments are made on moulds that are dipped in a vat of liquid latex, and more expensive items are cut and glued together from flat sheet latex. Sheet is much stronger and more durable than moulding and carries a higher shine.
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