Fashion
The natural world and the creation of life inspire the inventive work of Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, whose works have travelled from Paris for a new show at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. By Lucianne Tonti.
The unbridled world of Iris van Herpen
In The Garden of Earthly Delights by Flemish artist Hieronymus Bosch, animals are creatures with strange proportions and humans swim, frolic in the grass or fly in the sky. When Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen says of the painter whose work is a source of inspiration that he “could imagine a world that is even beyond the world we know today”, she could be talking about herself.
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is now showing at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), having travelled to Brisbane from the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, where it was one of the most well-attended shows in the museum’s 140 years. Van Herpen, at 40, is the youngest female designer to have staged a solo show there.
The exhibition is an extensive, nine-part journey through her preoccupation with the natural world and the creation of life. There are 130 garments on display alongside art and objects including skeletons, beehives and bluebottles. Everything is grouped into themes that start in the underworld and traverse upward to the cosmos through experiential states such as the mythology of fear, skeletal embodiment and growth systems. The experience of the exhibit is intensified by the music of sound artist Salvador Breed, who is also van Herpen’s romantic partner and collaborator.
Her catalogue of work is so rich in research, nuance and invention, in many ways it is better suited to display in a gallery. She is known for intricate, architectural garments and experimentation with technology and science to develop new materials. Such things are difficult to appreciate on the runway at haute couture week in Paris, where they are usually shown.
An example of this is the Magnetic Moon dress from Wilderness Embodied, her 2013 collection. It is made by combining iron fillings with resin, applying this to fabric and using magnets to “grow” the dress in small sections. The spiky textures and patterns that cover its entire surface resemble a moonscape. Adding to this lunar effect is its bulbous silhouette: perfectly round through the shoulders and sleeves but with definition at the waist and a short, fitted skirt.
Another dress on display from this collection is the Bird dress, made from piles and piles of pale pink rubber silicon cut into ribbons. Their cumulative effect is that of a bird’s feathers or plumes. Aside from the outlandish texture, the garment could be a simple cocktail dress with a V-neck line and long sleeves, with what appear to be the neck and head of four birds protruding at odd angles from its elbows and shoulders, making it seem monstrous and alive.
Van Herpen is slight, ethereal and birdlike, with long, wavy, golden-brown hair and dark, sparkly eyes. She was born in the Netherlands in 1984 and spent her childhood playing outside between “two very big rivers”. Recently, after many years living in the centre of Amsterdam, where her studio is, she and Breed moved outside the city to be closer to nature. They take long walks through the forest every day. “It feels as if time is cyclic in that sense where I’m more connected to my environment again, in connection to the seasons,” van Herpen says.
A variety of words are used to describe her: visionary, genius, omnivorous. In truth – like Alexander McQueen, for whom she interned in London – she is a polymath. Her references range from mythology to biomimicry to synaesthesia. She trained as a dancer, and this is evident in her fascination with the way garments move on and around the body. Unlike many of her peers, she is also a hands-on designer, draping and sculpting to construct the physical form. Her collaborators are many and varied: she works with universities, technicians, artists, architects and scientists to expand the boundaries of her craft and what we have come to expect of fashion. Dresses are made from materials concocted in a lab or constructed using kinetic technology or 3D printing. One idea can take years to be realised in a garment.
Her one true love in her work, however, appears to be nature and the mysterious power it has over the body and the brain. “People can sometimes forget that we are nature, especially when you live in the city,” she says. “I’m trying to show the interconnectedness of all the layers of life and the interdependence in relationship to nature through my work.”
In 2021, she collaborated with the environmental organisation Parley for the Oceans on her Earthrise collection and created dresses from upcycled marine debris. She worked with the British artist Rogan Brown to hand and laser cut the plastic fabric into fine webs that emulate coral and seaweed. These pieces were then layered in intricate patterns to create a range of floating, yet sculptural, dresses in cream, beige and white.
In her ability to produce garments that are radically embodied, such as creatures with minds and skeletal systems of their own, van Herpen is unmatched in the fashion industry. For a garment called the Syntopia dress from a 2018 collection of the same name, she crafted the visual effect of a bird’s wings in full flight. Using laser-cut crepe, black silk organza, mylar resin, stainless steel and heat, she created the effect of feathers fanning out into wings from a central point just above waist. To do this she has relied on chronophotography, a technique that records split-second phases of movement. Despite its body, the dress seems weightless. It defies gravity to expand outward from the miniskirt to the shoulders and into a V-shaped neckline that reaches towards the sky.
Another example is a dress inspired by the ocean called the Hydromedusa, from the Sensory Seas collection in 2020. Taking its name from the jellyfish that display bright, translucent colours, the dress is made from organza that has been digitally printed to mimic their appearance. The material is laser cut into small discs that have been stacked together in vertical lines wrapping around the body. The width of each disc grows gradually, starting small at the shoulders and becoming wider as the stacks lengthen down the torso into an asymmetrical, swishy, full-length skirt. The form of the dress is held together by a sheer tulle. It creates the appearance of a jellyfish expanding and contracting as it moves through water.
It’s difficult not to make comparisons to McQueen. The late designer also pushed boundaries, experimented and had technical skills that set him apart from his peers. But van Herpen feels at peace in herself in a way that is rare for creative directors of her calibre. McQueen was made infamously miserable by the constraints of the luxury houses he helmed and the relentless calendar of ready-to-wear collections and runway shows. Years before his tragic suicide in 2010, he declared, “give me time and I’ll give you a revolution”.
Ever the keen student, van Herpen seems to have taken a lesson from his example. She has declined invitations to commercialise her business or assume the creative director role of a luxury house. She presents just two collections a year. The garments she makes will never be sold in a retail store. Instead, they are collected by museums, bought by private clients or worn on the red carpet by celebrities such as Cate Blanchett, Beyoncé and Tilda Swinton.
“There is enough ready-to-wear, so my label is really focused on slow fashion. It’s a personal connection that I have with my clientele and there’s no overproduction, nothing is wasted,” she says. This is what gives her the space to be truly creative and to experiment with new materials and techniques that are not possible in ready-to-wear.
“One of the issues within the fashion system is that everyone is running so fast [the industry] is actually going forward very slowly,” she says. “When I want to add to the world, I want to do it in the right way.” In this sense, it seems McQueen was right: time allows her to be revolutionary.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 27, 2024 as "Otherworldly revolutionary".
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