Why women are making nude casts of their bodies

When management consultant Nomfundo Magudulela is leaving her home in Toronto, she is likely to smile slightly as she grabs a pair of sunglasses and some lip balm from the golden bowl in her foyer. It’s not quite what it seems: no ordinary bowl, but rather one made from a cast of her belly, when she was heavily pregnant with her now-toddler daughter, Liyana.

“I know it’s my belly, and my husband knows, but a guest walking in the door doesn’t — and I like that,” she says. “I wanted it to be a gorgeous object.” The 35-year-old took an impression of her stomach at home using a plaster strip kit before shipping the results to Ontario-based belly caster Dana Cote to create the final product. “It was a long journey for me to get pregnant, and it’s something to remember that — a constant reminder,” she says of the $450 sculpture.

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Belly casting is a growing trend among mothers-to-be — a chance to make a permanent memento of a momentous experience. Actor Jodie Turner-Smith, for example, refused to be cowed into caftans while pregnant, baring her belly on TV chat shows before asking an artist friend to help her create a cast of her full torso. Both Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian turned the belly casts they commissioned into plot points for their family’s reality show, while Cardi B posed for a shoot in her custom breast and belly cast, posting it on social media to announce the impending arrival of her second child.

Molded pieces are also a fashion trend, turbocharged by the appearance of Zendaya four years ago in a $29,900 hot-pink breastplate by Tom Ford (customized using a 3D body scan); she has worn others since, including a bronze version by Loewe supposedly inspired by Renaissance armor. Other designers and celebrities have followed suit, including Olivia Wilde, in Gabriela Hearst’s $9,990 Cleis dress with a built-in gold breastplate, and Rihanna, whose breastplate-clad performance at the Super Bowl also served as a pregnancy reveal — and was also designed by Loewe. That same designer was behind Taylor Russell’s Met Gala molded bustier earlier this month, while Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing’s custom dress for singer Tyla was made from a sandy mixture shaped around the singer’s own body into a gown.

Misha Japanwala is the Pakistani American artist who created Cardi B’s cast. She turned to the practice for her graduate collection while at fashion school in New York, using her own body as the model. Japanwala’s approach to life casting — whether bellies or other body parts, such as hands, or perhaps full torsos — emphasizes realism, unflinchingly. “I don’t change a single thing about a body. A pimple on the skin will show up,” she says. Her work, which is made in lightweight aqua resin, can be both displayed and worn as clothing. One recent art collector client, for example, commissioned a full cast of her torso, including her breasts, before an imminent double mastectomy, and wanted it to work both on the wall and her post-surgical body. “She wanted both kinds of hardware, because she wanted to be able to wear her old boobs to an event.” Many of Japanwala’s private commissions are from pregnant people. “They’re popular because it’s about a specific moment in time, documenting the power of the body to grow an entire human.”

That’s what drew Brooke Dougherty to commemorate her pregnancy this way. The 46-year-old couples therapist in Boise, Idaho, made her first cast at home using a kit with her husband’s help, but the results weren’t display-worthy. “It was the ugliest thing. It felt wrong to throw it in the garbage, but I wasn’t going to put it on my wall,” Dougherty laughs now, nodding to the rather hamfisted way they’d produced it. She turned to Cote to reboot it, cutting it and reshaping it to be reborn as a wood-patterned bowl; thrilled with the result, she allowed Cote to steer the entire procedure when she next got pregnant. Dougherty’s journey to a family wasn’t straightforward: She had four miscarriages between her first child and second successful pregnancy. Magudulela faced struggles, too. Many people who opt for a belly cast share similar stories, per Cote, which means that marking a successful pregnancy is more meaningful than ever.

Our approach to motherhood is changing: The U.S. median age for giving birth hit 30 for the first time in 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and each year, more than 100,000 women stateside are in their 40s when they do. That means they’re likely both to treat the experience differently (and, perhaps, more mindfully) and have greater disposable income to spend on an objet d’art like this. Dougherty also says nudity is powerful for a pregnant woman: “Naked, you’re a goddess with a baby inside your tummy. Going to the grocery store, you’re uncomfortable, your shoes are too tight, and you can’t even walk normally.”

Once, a swelling belly was to be shut away — it was called confinement in some circles, after all — but now, it can be a mark of pride. In 1991, when a naked, heavily pregnant Demi Moore appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, it was taboo-busting trailblazing; now, it’s another posing option. Serena Williams, Jessica Simpson, Cindy Crawford and Christina Aguilera all shot similar magazine covers.

Japanwala used her entire body for her first collection: One piece, which included her breasts and vulva, left her parents speechless. (“They’re the most supportive people now,” she says, reassuringly.) Such defiant sculpting is anchored in shamelessness, a rebuttal of the Urdu insult beghairat — roughly meaning “without shame or honor” — often hurled at women. She’ll hold open casting calls at her studio in Karachi, Pakistan, and finds many women will come to have their breasts and nipples cast, anonymously, without telling another soul. “That’s a radical act of quiet shamelessness, a secret between the artist and her,” she says.

Japanwala points to other cultural factors. Gender fluidity and more open discussions of trans bodies make us think about, and challenge us around, our physical forms. Lil Nas X, for example, wore one of her pieces, but opted to sport a cast based on Japanwala’s body rather than his own. “It felt so aligned, the documentation of his queerness through his music and my modeling and casting,” she says. And in a “send nudes” culture, where a hit dating show features every participant stark naked — that’s Britain’s “Naked Attraction,” which recently concluded its 12th season — we’re far more comfortable viewing a provocative cast of someone else’s naked form.

There’s a limited but controversial tradition of nude celebrity sculpture in the art world. California-based artist and professor Daniel Edwards earned notoriety for his figures of a naked, pregnant Britney Spears in 2006 and Kim Kardashian in 2013. Neither woman cooperated with the work (Spears would appear naked and pregnant, Demi Moore-style, a few months later on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, by her own choice), sparking charges of exploitation and critiques from both sides of the abortion debate, thanks to the title Edwards gave to the Spears piece, “Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston.”

Edwards claims his work was startling because pregnant bodies have rarely been depicted like this in art. “You can find a few sculptures that depict pregnant women through different time periods,” he says, “but they’re considered fertility forms, or a totem.” (The Madonna, perhaps, is the most commonplace example.)

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Around the same time, Marc Quinn, a figure in the Young British Artists movement, earned headlines worldwide with his stark sculpture of pregnant fellow artist Alison Lapper, who was born without arms and with shortened legs, which sat on the fourth plinth of London’s Trafalgar Square.

There’s a simpler reason for the rise in life casting, particularly around pregnancy, as actor Turner-Smith and singer Cardi B demonstrated. Casts like these are ideal for an Instagram reveal of a newborn — and, of course, social media has made visually arresting sculptures more crave-worthy. Wendy Buijs van Burg is a Netherlands-based casting artist whose torsos can cost up to 1,500 euros (around $1,600) each, adorned with shards of mosaics like an ancient Egyptian tomb treasure. But there are often deeper meanings behind her highly decorated, detailed pieces: One torso is festooned with seven butterflies, one each for the miscarriages that preceded the successful pregnancy. “Half the women who visit my studio did IVF or had trouble conceiving,” she says.

Sculptor CJ Munn’s specialty is high-definition work, much like that of Japanwala; she uses food-grade dental-casting gel to better pick up details of the nipples, skin and belly button, and it’s smeared cold on the body to allow it to set more slowly. Her pieces start at around 700 pounds (about $875), but can cost up to 15,000 pounds (about $18,765) for a foundry-cast bronze version.

One of her clients was Susi Smither, founder of ethical jewelry brand the Rock Hound. Like many women who opt for this procedure, she got pregnant later in life: Smither was in her early 40s when she had her now 4-year-old son, Merlin. Smither’s torso sculpture is dark blue with abstract astrological symbols, and it’s intended to evoke the magic of birth (and her son’s name). It’s as mesmerizing to him as to Smither and her husband. “There’s a chair underneath where we display it, and he can stand on it and put his head up inside,” she says, laughing. “He knew the connection without us even telling him.”

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