Iris van Herpen

Iris van Herpen (b. 1984) is an internationally acclaimed Dutch fashion designer. She was first introduced to fashion while interning for British designer Alexander McQueen and Dutch textile designer and artist Claudy Jongstra, before undertaking formal study at ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands. In 2006, van Herpen founded her eponymous label. She has staged collections at Paris Couture Week since 2011 and dressed iconic ‘muses’, such as Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Grimes and Cate Blanchett. As Gwendoline Christie–of Game of Thrones fame–once described, wearing a van Herpen is like ‘being bound up in the technology of what it is to be alive’.[1]

Van Herpen’s designs are radically future-facing. Her garments hybridise old-world couturier craftmanship and twenty-first century technology. She collaborates with architects, physicists, biologists, writers, sound designers, academics and technicians, all within the traditions of the fashion atelier. Over the past fifteen years, her collections have incorporated diverse fields of knowledge, like marine ecology, magnetism, biomimicry and bionics (the application of biological systems to human engineering). She has also drawn inspiration from eclectic sources: the aerial photography of Thierry Bornier and Andy Yeung; the kinetic sculptures of American artist Anthony Howe; a fifteenth century star map, Harmonia Macrocosmica, housed in the Embassy of The Free Mind in Amsterdam – a library and museum of historically forbidden texts.

Van Herpen’s interdisciplinary approach was encouraged from a young age. She trained in violin and classical ballet, the latter proving to be formative:

Those years of dance taught me so much about my body, the transformation of movement, the ‘evolution’ of shape, and how to manipulate both shape and movement. My interests in fashion were rooted in dance, in which I am now able to transform this kinaesthetic knowledge into new forms and materiality.[2]

Alchemy of Light, the closing ‘look’ from van Herpen’s Spring/Summer 2016-17 collection Between the Lines, is a prime example of this kinaesthetic approach. Backless, with an exaggerated frilled collar and A-line ‘skirt’, the garment’s silhouette is reminiscent of dance costuming, a kind of inverted tutu for the twenty-first century. As van Herpen states, ‘the exploration of femininity is really key to everything I do.’[3] Crafted from a fusion of sheer silk tulle, thermoplastic polymer and transparent liquid polyurethane, the garment ripples and shimmers with the movement of the body, mimicking water droplets. This illusion is a technical feat. Alchemy of Light is the culmination of 1400 hours of intensive hand-labour and manufacturing processes: laser-cutting, vacuum-forming, liquid-molding, heat-hand-molding, hand stitching and machine stitching.[4]

Over the years, van Herpen has explored optical trickery found in the natural world, not just as a design element but also to illuminate the intelligence of nature.[5] For Between the Lines, van Herpen collaborated with Berlin-based painter Esther Stocker–known for her immersive Op Art installations–on the collection’s runway set design. Leading, glitchy lines, in high contrast black and white, formed a backdrop of ‘dazzle camouflage’ – geometric patterning that was adapted from zoology but used most famously to disguise World War 1 naval ships. Similarly, disruptive camouflage–a type of crypsis used to trick the eye of predators and break up the ‘outline’ of an animal or bird–is employed by van Herpen across many garments and looks of Between the Lines. The kinetic patterns, silhouettes and repeating curves of her dresses and jackets, rather contrarily, belie the human form: ‘I really see fashion as a form of art.’[6]