created by Santiago Calatrava, to extract from them concepts of lightness and weightlessness. Like an architect, she too designs habitats for moving bodies, bodies projected with both density and lightness onto a planet in perpetual transformation. This is reflected in the compositions of the looks she creates, as well as in her runway shows, within spaces that are open to movements of the body and beats of the soul.
The facades of contemporary buildings, veritable architectural skins, are now redefining the way we live in them, thanks to intelligent building materials from both the natural world and new technologies. Now, Iris van Herpen’s dresses are also reinventing modes of inhabiting a garment. Her textiles have become innovative, hybrid materials, the results of 3D printing, laser cutting and ‘connected textiles’. By generating these totally new materials in fashion and putting such revolutionary textures to use, Iris van Herpen creates micro-architectures, just as builders of edifices do. Unlike traditional architectural structures, however, hers are in constant motion. Her dresses come to life with the slightest movement of the body, creating a ballet of textures and materials, friction and sliding, colours and transparency. Moves motions, are followed by countermotions: the second skin in which she covers our first skin triggers micro-dances that create spaces for breathing, meditation and reflection. The intimate dialogues between the private body and the public body that Iris van Herpen’s creations really are explore the infinite, yet razor-thin space between body and garment, the invisible frontier on the surface of the skin where the senses flourish.
In 2010, these fertile discussions about architecture were crosspollinations that resulted in Iris van Herpen becoming the first to showcase a 3D-printed runway look. Her collaborations with artists such as David Altmejd led her to reflect on the body as fiction. Clad in both concept and clothing, bodies dressed in Van Herpen’s creations established close connections with the past, evoking mythological reminiscences and fantastical narratives. In collaboration with another artist, Anthony Howe, she has propelled human beings into an imaginary future, where the garment itself is moving about, a kinetic garment in dialogue with complex human anatomy, with beauty and with the diversity of its environment.
For a joint art project with Kim Keever, Iris van Herpen has made human bodies float weightlessly, cradled by the colours of the cosmos, adorned with the vibrant hues of nebulae. Bodies lose their bearings and go floating off into infinity. Unhindered by frontiers or limits, her garments stretch, become diaphanous and silky, and unfold in dazzling chromatic ranges. Iris van Herpen’s universe become a poetic explosion of vibrant pigments. In contrast, with sculptor Rogan Brown, she
returned to the study of the infinitely small, viruses or bacteria, transposing them to the human scale on a body covered with laser- or scalpel-cut lace, an interpretation of the world of invisible living creatures, a dreamlike life, shaped like the multiple forms of plankton blooms, explosions of the forms of life thriving in aquatic environments.
She pushes new boundaries, setting up collaborations with high-level athletes who allow her to test the limits of bodies and of materials. With skydiving world champion Domitille Kiger, she braves the sky; with Julie Gautier, a free-diving champion, she braves the depths of water and the resulting pressure. Van Herpen’s decision to combine fashion and extreme sports in two ‘performance shows, Earthrise in 2021 and Carte Blanche in 2023, has resulted in a combination of opposites that transgresses all expectations, and is a continuation of her research into a body rather than into motion – a body competing with the elements, a body reborn.
IN A BODY-TO-BODY MOVEMENT
The purpose of each creation by Iris van Herpen, who selected clothing as her mode of transmission, seems to be to translate the invisible, the imperceptible, the impenetrable. Her deep sensitivity leads her, on the one hand, to holistically examine the world around her, from the smallest scale of living to the largest, and on the other hand to interpret it by dressing not just the body but also the soul. Her looks allow us to see and perceive her current concerns. A body dressed in a garment by Van Herpen becomes an object of reflection, an inquiry into humanity. It is no longer just a physical body: it is a representation of the present time, an open door to the past and the future.
Fashion, she says, should not be a static, fixed discipline. It is intended to be a metamorphic process. As a practitioner of classical and contemporary dance, Iris van Herpen has derived rigour and improvisation from these performing arts, two concepts she transposes into every step of her creative process. Thanks to her years of dance practice, she has acquired an ability to transform the body, an understanding of its fluidity through movement. She has consistently retained this fluid connection to the moving body, with its propensity to reveal what seems to be the very nature of being. She is close to avant-garde choreographers, including Damien Jalet, and does not hesitate to draw, as he does, from other forms of dance, such as Butoh.
In the manner of Tatsumi Hijakta, who drew inspiration from traditional Japanese dance, well as by studying European
artist Heishiro Ishino. From there, the next gallery places the body at the heart of both organic and architectural networks. It presents a dress as a metaphor for a Gothic cathedral, as well as a documentary by Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Michael Pitiot, Terra , dedicated to the defence of life and the interconnections within its ecosystems. The sixth gallery transcends the physical dimension of the body and observes the most astonishing brain phenomena, displaying the research and drawings of the Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal. This section, dedicated to synaesthesia, illustrates and clarifies the topic of senses and their perception, which can be multiple and quite different for each individual. It is accompanied by photographs by Tim Walker and a video performance by Refik Anadol.
The seventh section immerses the visitor in the darkest recesses of mythology, focusing on the figures of Medusa and Perseus. It explores the hybrid and tormented body that is burdened with a traumatic past. An excerpt from Vessel , the ballet by Damien Jalet, engages in a dialogue with a hybrid creation made of snakeskin and feathers by Kate McGwire, and a piece by ecoLogicStudio created by a tarantula. The eighth gallery accommodates an installation by Casey Curran and offers a reflection on the physical and spiritual place of human beings and what will become of them in their future environment.
The final exhibition galleries project Iris van Herpen’s creations into the vastness of the cosmos. Her dresses are presented out there, executing a celestial dance, as bodies floating in space and time. Alongside images of nebulae, Kim Keever’s photography encourages us to elevate our perspective and adopt a more holistic experience of the world, seeing every element, regardless of its scale or dimension, as being part of a whole.
Three additional spaces complement the visitor’s journey through this exhibition. The first offers an immersion into an evocation of Iris van Herpen’s studio. The second takes the form of a cabinet of curiosities and displays the accessories, shoes, masks and hairpieces she has designed, alongside a number of objects from the natural sciences and process videos. The final gallery allows the visitor more than a glimpse of living, moving human bodies, with looped video footage of the designer’s runway shows. The exhibition is accompanied by a sound composition created by Salvador Breed, which engages the senses and immerses the visitor even deeper into this exploratory journey around the human body and the other topics close to the creator’s heart.
‘Everything exists in nature. You just have to look carefully.’3
In 1641, René Descartes wrote in his Meditations on First Philosophy that ‘the soul ... is really distinct from the body, and yet so closely joined to it and united with it that they form, as it were, a single whole. 4’ Iris van Herpen’s works align directly with this holistic perspective, offering the individual not just clothing, but a wondrous, mysterious sensory and emotional experience. Her creations, promises of rebirth and regeneration to the body, are like fragile, sensitive structures supporting the landscapes of the soul. Crafted from resilient ecosystems found in nature, her creations are (often paradoxically) gentle yet complex sculptural works. They explore the role of design and technology in the shaping of human experience. They reveal themselves on the skin as a new dance in tune with life. Like a dance that rekindles the body and invites us to take care of it, and also attend to our soul and spirit. As Iris van Herpen’s dresses emerge from her hands and her lucid dreams to enchant the world, they remind us of the urgency of living in harmony with nature, reconnecting this world with its roots and making it receptive to what tomorrow brings.
1 ‘My spirit compels me to tell of forms changed into new bodies.’ Anne Delibes-Videau, ‘Mutatas dicere formas : signification de la métamorphose dans l’épopée ovidienne‘, Bulletin de l’association Guillaume Budé, 2012.
2 Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les Rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matière, 1942.
3 Iris van Herpen
4 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008.
In her submarine performance, Carte Blanche , presented in 2023 and featuring free diver Julie Gautier wearing a dress and dancing in perfect osmosis with the depths, water within the body and water outside the body engage in a dialogue, to the point where they become one. Water fluctuates between a tangible and an intangible state. As a hyphen linking the sky with the ocean, as a raindrop or a tsunami, an allegorical poem or the gates to hell, harmony or chaos, it invokes, apart from its multiple motions and outbursts, the designer’s bountiful imagination. A bubble suspended in space, a slim, lustrous wave, a transparent splash, in turquoise blue or ultramarine, with crystal arrays, geometric structures... Iris van Herpen’s water-themed works fully reveal the mysteries and shapeshifting powers of natural elements.
CLOÉ PITIOT & LOUISE CURTIS
1 Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les rêves. Essai sur l’imagination de la matière, 1942.
