There is a moment in ballet that photography has always envied. The dancer rises onto pointe, the working leg unfolds into a développé, and for a breath, the entire body becomes a single continuous line, from the fingertips through the épaulement down to the last inch of the arch. Nothing about it is accidental. Every degree of turnout, every angle of the port de bras is the result of years of control so complete it reads as ease.

Latex, when taken seriously, does something remarkably similar. It takes the body and turns it into a line. It removes everything incidental, every fold and drape that ordinary fabric adds, and leaves only the form itself, precise and unbroken. For almost seventeen years, latexperiment.com has worked from exactly this conviction: that latex is a fashion medium of the highest order, artistic, exacting, and entirely free of cliché. The platform has just been completely relaunched, and with the relaunch begins a chapter I have wanted to produce for a long time.

Two disciplines, one language

Ballet and latex share a vocabulary before they ever share a frame. Both are obsessed with placement. Both live or die by the quality of a line. A tendu is only a tendu when the foot is fully articulated; a latex silhouette only works when the garment fits like a second skin, which is why nothing in this series comes off a rack. Every outfit is made to measure in Cologne by *latexkind, cut and built for one specific body, the way a tutu is built for one specific dancer.

The pointe shoe presented its own question. A dancer's shoes are her instrument, broken in, sewn, shellacked, entirely personal, and I had no interest in hiding them or replacing them with props. So latexkind developed something that, as far as I know, has not existed before: latex covers made especially for pointe shoes, fitted over the dancer's own pair. The shoe keeps its function, its platform, its familiar feel; the surface becomes part of the look. A relevé en pointe in gleaming latex, from the crown of the head to the tip of the box, one uninterrupted material line. Alternatively, the dancer can further experiment and take the challenge of wearing the very special boots called "ballet heels", known from the work of another ballet dancer, Alexandra Potter, who was seen in them for 14 years at the sister website ballet-heels.com

What the series will show

These shoots are not dance photography with a costume change, nor are they fashion photography with a dancer standing in. They sit deliberately between the two. An arabesque held long enough to be read as sculpture. An adagio slowed further still by the way light travels across a polished surface. Port de bras that turns a sleeve into choreography.

Seventeen years of producing this platform have taught me that the best photographs come from collaboration between people who take their own discipline seriously, and classical dancers take theirs more seriously than almost anyone.

An open door

The relaunch carries forward nearly two decades of work, but the next chapter is unwritten, and it will be written together with artists whose training gives them what no styling can fake: absolute command of line, of balance, of the body in space. Some of the first conversations have already begun, and they have confirmed what I suspected: that dancers understand this material instinctively because they have spent their lives doing what latex does, revealing form through discipline.

If you read this and recognize your own language in it, the door is open. I would love to hear from you.

Raymond K. Larum, photographer and creative director, Cologne