Haute future
Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen has had her clothes modelled by the likes of Björk and Beyoncé. Her high-tech creations seem more likely to wind up in museums than in department stores
The designer Iris van Herpen does not like computers, and for half of her adult life she happily did not have one. This is unusual, because van Herpen is only 31, and many people would argue that she is the most technically astute and adventurous designer working today.
She creates clothes to wear six months from now, but she also delves into sciences that may not be mainstream for six years — or even six decades.
While many designers work with artists and musicians to produce lyrical and even majestic collections, van Herpen is more inclined to work with computer programmers, nano-robotics scientists and biologists.
Van Herpen has “grown” garments from magnetic fabric, pulled and twisted into something geological, organic and strangely beautiful. She is best known for her work with 3D printers — not simply to create bits of decoration or to mould a striking heel but to realize concepts that don’t look like clothes at all.
Her clothes have been worn by provocateurs such as Lady Gaga, Björk and Beyoncé. But they have not been adopted by the well-to-do philanthropic set. These frocks are more likely to be favoured by museums than by department stores.
Last week, Atlanta’s High Museum of Art opened Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion, a full-scale, solo exhibition. Next year, her work will be featured in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“It’s our first show about fashion,” says Sarah Schleuning, curator of decorative arts and design at the High. “(Van Herpen is) this great thinker and she makes this incredible work.”
Van Herpen began her career in haute couture, the rarefied division of French fashion defined by hand-craftsmanship and personalized fit. In recent years, she has moved into ready-to-wear, a step intended to help expand her reach in the marketplace.
Van Herpen’s most recent ready-to-wear presentation, for spring 2016, was inspired by the living bridges in India — tree roots that have grown across crevices and streams, providing a route of passage.
“For me, it was a really good example of something already there that shows the potential of living architecture,” van Herpen says.
The centrepiece of this show was an installation in which actress Gwendoline Christie (from Game of Thrones) lay peace- fully on a circular slab surrounded by robotic arms that had woven a strange, spongy mesh garment atop her.
“In the first years I had my label, I did everything by hand. I didn’t even work with a sewing machine,” says van Herpen. “At some point, I realized I had reached a level of control I couldn’t go beyond. I saw 3D printing in architecture, where it’s used for modelling. I was struck by the complexity and detailing it was able to do.”
Andrew Bolton, curator in the Met’s Costume Institute, says van Herpen’s groundbreaking work is comparable to the technical breakthroughs achieved in haute couture, beginning in the 19th century, by Lesage embroiderers and the feather-making craftsmen of Lemarié.
“I really think this is the future with the collaborations she’s initiating with computer programmers, scientists and biologists,” Bolton says.
Van Herpen is Dutch, with a wide forehead, pale eyes and the delicate bone structure of a sparrow. She once wanted to be a classical ballet dancer, but she decided that fashion gave her more ways to express herself than movement.
She founded her company in 2007 after studying at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem, Netherlands, and interning at Alexander McQueen. Although she pre- sents her collections in Paris, she lives in Amsterdam, and her idiosyncratic work is influenced by that environment.
“Fashion and architecture share a logical link. I wouldn’t know how to not be influenced by my surroundings,” she says. “What I like about Amsterdam is everything is crooked. It doesn’t look like it makes any sense. I love that water is central to everything.”
Van Herpen’s manner is contained and precise. She speaks quietly. She is not one for bold gestures. She is excited by concepts and hypotheses, and she steers clear of a fashion vocabulary overpopulated with exclamations of “amazing!” The brand is on social media, but van Herpen says that she is not the one updating the Instagram and Facebook feeds.
She works in a manner that is more familiar in the realm of science, finding co-conspirators at MIT and the University of Innsbruck, in Austria — ateliers of science, she calls them.
“The things I do, I could not do without that support. I think a lot of (fashion) houses are really built to be locked, to be privately driven. If you look at the universe of architecture, it’s much more open-source,” van Herpen says. “I can’t imagine being in my own head, in my own atelier, producing clothes.”
“Fashion and architecture share a logical link. I wouldn’t know how to not be influenced by my surroundings.”
IRIS VAN HERPEN