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The Los Angeles designer behind JENNAX has dressed SZA, Cardi B, and A$AP Rocky’s AWGE in latex, and now she’s asking what else the material could become.
Jenna, the mononymous designer and creative director behind JENNAX, traces her relationship with fashion back to her mother’s boutique near Heidelberg, Germany. She went on to study fashion design in Berlin, then spent roughly six years working in advertising and commercial film production in the city before a move to Los Angeles pulled her back toward building things of her own rather than executing someone else’s brief.
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The project that’s most often cited as her breakthrough was a collaboration with adidas: a fully latex football jersey made for the German national team around a recent European Championship, an idea she says she pitched to adidas herself using prototypes she’d already built. The piece landed on the cover of 032c and circulated widely from there. Not long after, AAPRocky brought her into help shape AWGE′s third runway collection, shown at Halldes Lumieˋresin downtown Manhattan during NewYork FashionWeek′sFall/Winter2026season, a show built around breaking the fourth wall between backstage prep and the runway itself, stage alongside new AAP Rocky x PUMA sil and attend by Rihanna in the front row. That collection leaned into a personal register for Rocky as much as a spectacle, pairing its racing-inspired styling with custom baby carriers and strollers that nodded to his own fatherhood, a tonal range Jenna’s latex contributions had to sit inside rather than dominate. Jenna has said the two of them worked through more than 150 designs together in the process. Not long after that show, she launched JENNAX as its own label, describing it as an experimental venture operating at the intersection of athletics, luxury, and material development.
Outside JENNAX itself, Jenna has also kept up styling work for Alice Hollywood, a Los Angeles brand run by a designer named Shane, who was one of the first people to ask her to style for his label after she moved to the city and who’s remained a close friend since. She’s said she never set out to become a stylist and mostly takes the work on out of loyalty to a label she genuinely believes in, one of the few outside commitments she’s kept alongside building her own.
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Jenna’s central argument is that latex arrives pre-loaded with a single association, fetish and skin-tight sexuality, and that most of her practice is spent trying to pull the material out of that one lane. “I want to treat latex almost like any other textile,” she’s said of the approach, and the label’s output backs that up: latex reworked as denim-style pieces, lace, sportswear, a football jersey, a tracksuit, even crocodile-effect skin. Getting there is less about styling than material science. Jenna and her team lean on laser cutting, molding, airbrushing, and surface treatments to push latex into forms and contexts the material has no obvious business occupying.
That tension, feminine against indie, polished against slightly uncomfortable, runs through how she describes her own aesthetic more broadly: a mix of the raw energy she associates with Berlin and the glamour of Los Angeles, or, in her own shorthand, familiar things made unfamiliar. She’s cited inspiration coming as much from watching how older people dress in Eastern European countries, or wandering into an unremarkable neighborhood bar, as from anything already curated to look inspiring.
The label’s early identity leaned specifically on a crocodile-effect surface treatment, a texture Jenna and her team developed through repeated surface work rather than sourcing it pre-made, and it’s become close to a house signature the way a specific stitch or silhouette might be for another label. Beyond that one finish, the approach stays deliberately restless: a soccer jersey rebuilt in latex reads nothing like the label’s lace-paneled tops, even though both start from the same base material worked out of the same small studio.
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JENNAX’s celebrity dressing has mostly arrived the same way: stylists or artists finding the work online or through Jenna’s showroom at NSA in Los Angeles, then coming back specifically for the label’s crocodile-textured latex. For SZA, the team built a crocodile-textured latex dress for the BET Awards that incorporated Adinkra-inspired elements at the artist’s request, hand-painted rather than printed. For Cardi B, JENNAX built a custom crocodile latex corset and leggings, fully airbrushed, that Cardi B wore courtside at a New York Knicks game before changing into it again for a halftime performance with the Knicks City Dancers.
The label’s own site lists a wider circle of names who’ve worn JENNAX pieces beyond those two custom commissions, including Rico Nasty in a blue latex soccer jersey, Tinashe in a butter-yellow latex core top, Latto in a latex dusted jacket, the Clermont Twins in a lace soccer top, and model Veneda Carter in a latex training zipper. Jenna has described the process behind the custom pieces as a negotiation rather than a straightforward commission, merging her own visual language with whatever the artist already represents so the result reads as recognizably JENNAX without erasing whose moment it actually is.
JENNAX isn’t operating in a vacuum, either. Latex has pushed further into mainstream red-carpet territory across fashion more broadly over the past couple of years, turning up in other designers’ premiere-carpet gowns and layered onto major stars for film openings, work that has nothing to do with JENNAX directly but reflects the wider climate the label is building inside: a material treated almost exclusively as fetishwear a decade ago now shows up routinely in more conventional celebrity dressing.
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Jenna has also started pushing latex off the body entirely. An early experiment was a chair built around the label’s signature crocodile latex finish, an idea that started out too fragile to actually sit on before further material development made it functional without losing the look. That side of the practice now runs under the name Crocodile Latex Studies, a standing, multi-disciplinary venture separate from JENNAX’s clothing line. She’s said there’s a further object-based collaboration in progress that she isn’t ready to discuss in detail, built around the same basic question as the chair: what latex can be once it’s no longer wrapped around a person.
The clothing side of the business, meanwhile, still runs as a small, direct-to-consumer operation rather than one built around wholesale accounts. JENNAX’s regular retail lineup, sold through the label’s own site, spans roughly $85 for accessories up to $490 for a latex jacket, with soccer-jersey-style pieces and lace tops filling out the range in between. That lineup includes latex halter, plunge, and cami tops sold under an “Essentials” name, a core top and shorts pairing, the $490 dusted jacket, and a latex soccer jersey that started life as part of Latex Nations before folding into the label’s standing catalog, alongside a run of lace tops and tights that soften the harder latex pieces into something closer to everyday wear. Every piece is made to order, with a two to three week turnaround, a scale that fits a label whose bigger cultural moments have so far come from one-off custom commissions and limited capsules rather than a wide retail footprint.
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That expansion is playing out on a bigger stage this year through Latex Nations, a JENNAX capsule timed to the 2026 World Cup that reimagines the national kits of Germany, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina as handcrafted latex jerseys, each rendered in a high neck, short sleeves, and racing-inspired graphics rather than a traditional jersey cut. Germany nods to where Jenna grew up, the United States to where she’s based now, and Mexico to the cultural weight it carries in her adopted city of Los Angeles as much as in the sport itself. Brazil’s jersey breaks from the rest of the capsule’s opaque builds with a sheer, jelly-toned yellow latex printed with the JENNAX logo. “It’s exploring the tension between performance and fetish, as well as masculinity and femininity,” Jenna has said of the collection, framing the jersey, a garment built around function and athleticism, as a deliberate collision with a material carrying an entirely different set of associations.
Latex Nations arrives as JENNAX is simultaneously developing its first ready-to-wear collection, a step beyond the custom pieces and limited capsules that have defined the label so far. Jenna hasn’t put a date on when that line lands, and given how much of JENNAX’s identity has come from one-off commissions built around a specific artist or moment, a genuine ready-to-wear collection, sized and stocked rather than made once for one person, would mark a real shift in how the label operates. Whatever comes out of that shift, Jenna’s own description of her process suggests it won’t move her further from the industrial, slightly uncomfortable edge she’s built the label around. She’s said some of her clearest ideas arrive in total silence, alone, well away from a studio, less an act of design than a matter of simply being open to whatever surfaces, and on her own account, the ready-to-wear line is a continuation of that same instinct: push a material everyone thinks they already understand into a shape nobody expected.
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