Current finite element (FE) approaches to model clothing on the human body in terms of personal protective equipment (PPE) are mainly bound to the discretization of the outer element layer of the human body model (HBM) and the given posture. Costs for PPE prototyping could be lowered drastically if an efficient and posture-independent clothing modeling method would be available, so that the effectiveness of PPE in terms of injury risk mitigation could be assessed in a donned configuration. In the present study, an FE modeling method was developed to map 2D planar clothing structures on arbitrary 3D human body contours. The method was successfully applied to the GHBMC M50-PS with a modular design based ballistic vest including all components, joints and fasteners. The 3D shaped clothing models in combination with arbitrary HBM allow to analyze the structural interaction of protective clothing with the human body in unforeseen dangerous situations. The presented method facilitates the building of full featured FE models of PPE in donned configurations.