Iris van Herpen’s exotic couture collection is coming to Australia
Beloved by eccentric and icons such as Bjork and Lady Gaga, polymath Iris van Herpen reveals how her synaesthesia – including ‘seeing’ music – informs her out-of-this-world designs.
You may not instantly recognise the name Iris van Herpen, but even those with a passing interest in fashion will have come across the Dutch couturière’s singular and strangely beautiful garments. Since the inception of her eponymous fashion house in 2007, the 40-year-old designer has made her name by blending cutting-edge technology with couture craftsmanship and a radically romantic vision of the future.
Van Herpen is like a mad scientist with a shrewd eye for beauty and an interdisciplinary, researched, polymathic approach to her work. Her Amsterdam studio is as much a laboratory as it is an atelier – one that attracts a company of scientists, architects and computer programmers. Speaking with her, you get the sense that she is a designer more interested in letting her imagination run wild in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border, where she is a regular visitor, than schmoozing with the fashion week elite.
Her garments, beloved by eccentrics and icons such as Björk, Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, and Lady Gaga, employ technology rarely seen outside a laboratory. They are, in a word, mind-boggling. She is, after all, the first designer to ever show a 3-D printed dress on the runway (in her Crystallization collection, which Time Magazine named one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2011). Take, for instance, her autumn 2013 couture collection, created in collaboration with product designer Jólan van der Wiel, which used iron filings mixed with resin as the base for dresses shaped using magnets. One of her best known pieces, the “Bene Gesserit”gown made for the experimental musician Grimes for the 2021 Met Gala, took 900 hours to perfect and featured a startling exoskeleton that looked like silver suspended in air, crafted from mirror-finish liquid silicone hand-cast into lightning bolt shapes and fixed onto 26 metres of gradient-dyed, hand-pleated silk.
Last year, van Herpen became the youngest female designer to be granted a solo show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris: the five-years-in-the-making exhibition Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, which opened in November to rave reviews and snaking lines. It will eventually travel to Singapore, Rotterdam and possibly the US, and on June 29 it opens at Brisbane’s modern art gallery, QAGOMA.
While some of van Herpen’s works are scattered across Australian museums – including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, and the Art Gallery of South Australia - Sculpting the Senses will be the most comprehensive survey of her practice ever displayed in the southern hemisphere.
Nina Miall, the QAGOMA curator who, along with Jacinta Giles and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’ Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis, helped bring Sculpting the Senses to Australia, tells Review that this show is like no fashion exhibition she has seen.
“Most fashion exhibitions seem to be built around the cult of the designer and their personality. This is an exhibition very much about ideas. It weaves art, science, design, technology, marine biology, and quantum physics. Iris is such an unlikely fashion designer in many respects. She seems to be interested in everything but fashion.”
When Review catches up with van Herpen at her home in the northern Netherlands village of Purmerland over a video call, she is sitting in a sparsely decorated room, filled with the kind of pure, morning light reserved for the countryside. She has a deep tan and wild, unbrushed hair. Her face is bare, save for a dramatic line of kohl along her lower waterline.
Van Herpen moved from her tiny hometown of Wamel in the south to Amsterdam in her twenties to attend fashion school and later to study under the British designer Alexander McQueen. She has been living in Amsterdam but relocated to the countryside two years ago to reconnect with nature “in a more profound way”.
“You can visit nature on a holiday, but it’s a different thing when it’s part of your daily life and you can embed it into your work from the very beginning. Rather than it being an inspiration, it becomes part of your whole body,” she says, in her lilting, soft voice.
Wamel, near Den Bosch, the town of Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch (a profound influence on her work), is perched on top of a dyke between two big rivers. “It’s an amazing area, but also a very fragile area. We had to evacuate once because they were afraid the water would come too high and it would not hold …” she remembers. This connection to water, in its myriad forms, has been a constant motif in van Herpen’s work since her label’s inception in 2007. “From clouds to crystals, it’s everywhere – inside and outside of us. It can be very scary, but also incredibly beautiful,” she says.
Van Herpen chose to design Sculpting the Senses thematically rather than chronologically. Water is the first of nine themes, spread across 12 rooms. “When you go through the exhibition, the end is very connected to the beginning. In a way, it’s built up as being a cycle of life, inspired by the concept of macro cosmica,” she explains. If “macro cosmica” (roughly, the universe) means nothing to you, you’re not alone, it’s a term van Herpen picked up at The Embassy of the Free Mind – a museum and library in Amsterdam that contains a collection of forbidden books from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, one of which is presented in the first room of her exhibition.
“This place is really precious,” she says of The Embassy. “It was modern science giving a different perspective on our position in the universe that was against the leading religions at the time. It was a space to create different perspectives, to open your mind. I think both art and science are doing that in society.”
Nestled alongside van Herpen’s 100 haute couture creations are more than 80 pieces borrowed from artists, architects, and institutions. There are projections by Canadian media artist Philip Beesley, an underwater video, titled Carte Blanche that van Herpen, a former ballet dancer, made alongside free-diver, dancer and filmmaker Julie Gaultier, in place of a runway show; and large-scale 3D sculptures by David Spriggs.
“Working with a lot of collaborators is such a chaotic but exciting part of the process,” says van Herpen. The forthcoming exhibition will feature a new addition, a sculpture by the Quandamooka artist Megan Cope. “She has such a profound connection to nature that is woven into every vessel of her work,” says van Herpen.
The Dutch designer has synaesthesia “in a subtle way”: when she hears music, she starts seeing patterns. “It’s not a coincidence that my partner is a musician,” she says, referring to long-time boyfriend and creative collaborator, composer Salvador Breed, who has created a soundscape for each room in the exhibition. “When we started working together, he would make sound textures inspired by what I was working on, but I could also sometimes turn it around and translate the textures or sounds that I heard from him into the works.”
Recently, she has been shifting her attention away from fashion, onto making large-scale sculptures. “They are extensions of the haute couture pieces that create a dialogue between these two worlds.”
It’s an unusual freedom to have as the head of a fashion house, but van Herpen tells Review that she has “always felt slightly strange” about the title of fashion designer.
She has a difficult time with the word “fashion,” and its synonymity with consumerism. “It relates to something we want really briefly, that’s not interesting in two or three months.”
“I really see fashion as a form of art. The origins of fashion, of dressing ourselves, is ancient, it’s historic, it connects us to our cultures, identities, and personal forms of expression.”
She is deeply aware that fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world, and wants it to move away from its “narrative created by consumerism”.
“That is something we have to go away from,’’ she says. “It’s an addiction that people have to get rid of.”
Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses opens at QAGOMA in Brisbane on June 29, and runs through to October 7.
