Iris van Herpen may very well be the designer whose work is studied as closely by architects as by fashion students.
To wit: Curation of the retrospective exhibit of the Dutch couturier opening to the public on Wednesday at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris was assigned to its design and architecture historians, not fashion specialists.
“Iris is not only a fashion designer,” declared Cloé Pitiot, curator of the museum’s modern and contemporary department. “She works in collaboration with many artists, architects, designers and historians, extending the boundaries of fashion. Hers is a new way of thinking about tomorrow.…Iris is very preoccupied by the planet and our future, and I think it’s important for the public to see how a fashion designer can be so open to humanity.”
“Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” mingles about 100 haute couture creations with fossils, skeletons, avant-garde artworks, microscopes, various tools and installations meant to invoke the entire cosmos.
“It was important also for us to create links with science, because Iris is very connected to physics and all the other sciences connected to humans,” Pitiot said.
The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London is renowned for its cutting-edge approach to urbanism and future ways of living, dedicated to subjects not dissimilar to van Herpen’s scope of interest, which is why students and researchers there study her designs, Pitiot said.
Joseph Walsh, an Irish furniture-maker, is another figure from the design world who follows van Herpen’s work.
While contacting artists, industrial designers and other experts from various fields, Pitiot and associate curator Louise Curtis rarely needed to explain van Herpen’s work, or do much convincing for them to contribute artifacts, bespoke artworks or information for the exhibition.
Van Herpen has collaborated with artists including Jolan van der Wiel, Rogan Brown and Neri Oxman, and such cutting-edge architects as Philip Beesley and Benthem and Crouwel Architects.
For the exhibition’s first rooms, titled “Water and Dreams,” Beesley and van Herpen conscripted Rotterdam-based Hans Boodt Mannequins to create mannequins that seem assembled from hovering liquids.
Visitors are advised to charge their smartphones to the max before visiting the exhibition — tantamount to visiting a natural history museum, a contemporary art gallery, a planetarium and a fashion show combined. It is visually arresting from start to finish, with a touch of the magician.
“I think a lot of my work is about a hypnotic sense — an illusion,” van Herpen allowed.
The human body is a key theme, a nod to the designer’s early training as a ballet dancer, but treated more from a scientific angle, from the cells to the muscles and bone, Pitiot said.
A giant hyperrealistic wave installation by Japanese collective Mé is linked to the fact that the body is composed of 70 percent water and that van Herpen, now based just outside of Amsterdam, lives under constant threat of rising sea levels.
In a projection of the microorganisms found in sea water backdropping one vitrine, one can spy elements of her fashion silhouettes.
What’s more, the designer filmed her spring 2023 collection on divers in Europe’s deepest pool, while her fall 2024 couture show was inspired by the cutting-edge aquatic architecture being pioneered by the likes of Bjarke Ingels and Jacques Rougerie.
“I think it will be interesting for the public because it’s not only a display of dresses,” Pitiot said in an interview at the museum. “Each section explores a question for the visitor — a question about the body, or about how we are living on this planet.”
She marveled that stands of van Herpen’s clothes clustered together can bring to mind a futuristic skyline.
Ultimately, her designs radiate otherworldly beauty and speak of human possibilities, adding up to an optimistic vision in an unsettled world, Pitiot concluded.
The exhibition unfurls around nine themes — including the origins of life, skeletons, nature and mythology — reinforced by scores of artworks by the likes of Rogan Brownart, Wim Delvoye, Tim Walker, Matthew Harrison, Damien Jalet, Kohei Nawa and Casey Curran, along with design pieces by Neri Oxman, Ren Ri, Ferruccio Laviani and Tomáš Libertíny.
Still, there is plenty to see for fashion enthusiasts, with fans making van Herpen’s delicate creations tremble and a recreation of her Amsterdam atelier providing a window into her craft, a blend of traditional techniques like hand-pleating and the most advanced 3D printing and silicon molding techniques available.
Visitors also get to see her experiments on miniature dress forms and how embellishments are sometimes drawn on paper first and then draped on a Stockman.
In an interview, van Herpen said she has kept an “artist copy” of each of her couture dresses since she established her house 16 years ago, allowing the Arts Décoratifs to display works across her entire fashion career.
The oldest pieces, made with the metal ribs of umbrellas, date from her “Chemical Crows” collection, presented at Amsterdam Fashion Week not long after she graduated from ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem and after a brief internship with Lee Alexander McQueen.
Her early designs reflect her devotion to painstaking craft and early interest in organic forms and scientific inspirations.
While feminine empowerment lies at the heart of van Herpen’s esthetic, her early work focused on protective, armor-like constructions, whereas more recent collections have been “much softer and more focused on the sensitivity and the sensory experience of femininity,” she mused.
Her frothy, lace-like constructions wink back to some of the objects in the exhibition: a fossilized sea sponge and an artwork of delicate white webs created by real spiders.
One of the most recent designs featured in the exhibition was a custom piece for Beyoncé, which the star acquired for her “Renaissance” world tour and donned for her performance in Amsterdam.
“I felt really honored to be part of that and to translate her vision via my own signature design,” van Herpen enthused. “Of course, she’s very powerful, but I also wanted to bring in an ethereal quality to the piece.”
Dresses worn by Björk, Grimes and private clients are also displayed, with photos of numerous celebrities in her designs hugging the coiling staircase linking the two levels of the exhibition.
An immersive journey engaging all the senses, the show has a soundtrack of original music by artist Salvador Breed — or sometimes disquieting crackling noises — and concludes with rooms dedicated to van Herpen’s atelier.
Here, visitors can discover hundreds of works in progress and design experiments, from fabric swatches and examples of “micro architecture” to a cabinet of curiosities containing accessories, books, drawings, sculptures and elements of natural history.
“It’s really to show the evolution of all the craftsmanship,” van Herpen explained.
Samples of some of the materials van Herpen deploys for her dresses are displayed in petri dishes, while hundreds of others are arranged in a gradation of colors and textures evoking faraway planets, or undiscovered undersea worlds.
Known for creations that use technologies from laser-cutting and 3D printing to electromagnetic weaving, van Herpen has been the subject of solo shows at leading institutions including the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands in 2012, the Textile Museum of Sweden in 2014, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in 2015 and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 2018.
The Paris show runs through April 28.
