Dutch couturier Iris Van Herpen moves into the art world
The Dutch couturier has always resisted being categorised into one discipline. Her recent couture show proves she doesn’t have to be.
Iris van Herpen has been contemplating time. The Dutch couturier – who was in Brisbane earlier this month to open a major survey of her work, Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, at Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art – recently up-ended the idea of it within the context of a haute couture show.
Instead of her usual runway show last month van Herpen, who has blurred disciplines of technology, science, art and architecture in her work since opening her Amsterdam atelier in 2007, had models such as Coco Rocha appear as if artworks in a gallery.
Wearing intricate haute couture gowns, the models were fixed to the wall with impasto-covered canvas. Here they interacted with attendees – swaying, dancing and nodding. Included in Hybrid Show were four of Van Herpen’s large-scale “aerial sculptures” – sculpted from tulle and 3D printed objects, and her first foray into “pure” art.
This move comes in part, she says, from the way visitors to the Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses exhibition at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris – 370,000 of them between November last year and April this year – interacted with her work.
“We’ve had such amazing feedback from Paris where people visited the exhibition multiple times, stayed for hours, and lots of people (were) drawing. And I really learned that people understand the work so much better by really having time to look at it,” she says.
She says Hybrid Show took inspiration from the exhibition in other ways, too, namely the idea of slowing down and seeing things from a new perspective.
“People had a more profound experience with the work by having this time, that I also wanted to create a hybrid setting. It’s sort of the best of both worlds where people could find their own time to look at it and not three seconds that pass you,” she says.
She liked how attendees experienced the show differently to a typical runway show, which tends to flash past in mere minutes: “Everyone was mingling together and it was much more social. When you are taken to a seat and you can’t move, there’s not as much interaction between people … it became something more shareable, more social.”
Challenging the sometimes stuffy worlds of haute couture has long been van Herpen’s modus operandi. In her career van Herpen, whose clients include Tilda Swinton, Bjork and Beyonce, has collaborated with marine biologists and architects, including Zaha Hadid, the respected Iraqi-British architect who died in 2016.
Van Herpen has thrown dresses out of the sky and deep into the ocean, and grown and printed her own materials. Her clients, she says, tend to collect her pieces as they would art – sometimes displaying them in their homes.
The Sculpting the Senses exhibition in Brisbane melds her cutting-edge creations with artefacts sourced from the gallery’s archives, from fossils to works from First Nations artists. Some of the dresses, or “looks” as van Herpen calls them, move kinetically. The experience of walking through the nine “chapters” of the exhibition, with a soundscape by van Herpen’s partner and collaborator, Dutch sound artist Salvador Breed, allows for rumination on ideas, creativity, time and all that connects this.
It also synthesises van Herpen’s long-held view that haute couture ought to be a melting pot of ideas, of the past and future.
“Couture has a beautiful history throughout time,” she says. “I think when I look back at couture, what I really love is that it has always been about a certain inventiveness towards the body. It’s about inventing the identity and transforming yourself, both as a philosophy but also in terms of craftsmanship.
“So this experimental process has been really the heart of couture. And I’ve dived quite deeply into all of these techniques and processes. I’ve taken some of them into my own work, but at the same time I’m obviously present in the world that I’m living now and doing my collaborations with architects and scientists and experimenting on new techniques. And it’s beautiful to bring those different times together into a hybrid.
“I think that’s the way to look at the future of fashion, to take the beauty of its history but also to evolve it into a new being and to shake it up a bit. Because some of the couture shows can be more focused on the past than on the present. And I feel it’s really important to connect it to the world that we are living in now because there’s so much going on.
“I think fashion is more connected to the world around it, politically, socially, it’s just become more aware of its surroundings.”
Pushing haute couture – the pinnacle of craftsmanship in fashion with the price tags to match – forward is an impetus for the industry at large, too. As the luxury industry is slowing in growth, the haute couture client remains largely unaffected by financial turmoils.
Sidney Toledano, chairman of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, which controls the stringent rules of haute couture, told Women’s Wear Daily during haute couture week that “Globally, the haute couture is doing well”, noting also the success of high jewellery. “People like to invest in very high-quality products.”
Still, Toledano, a long-time luxury executive and an adviser to LVMH chairman and chief executive Bernard Arnault, told the publication that evolutions in haute couture were in place with the Chambre Syndicale studying new ways to update the requirements for brands wishing to show on the schedule, such as reducing the required frequency of shows. New players are expected to join the schedule in seasons to come.
In any case, van Herpen, who was awarded the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture last month, has always resisted being typecast into one mode of creation. By changing the way she creates and shows her work she says she is delving further into what being a truly disciplinary artist means. Yes, of course she believes that fashion and art exist in the same universe.
“I’m taking more freedom to express who I am,” she says. “I have a dance background. When I went to the art academy, I did multiple disciplines for the first year. And then you have to choose one discipline. That’s how our society works and that’s what you continue. But … I’ve always tried to find my own way of working because … my brain doesn’t work like that.”
Allowing people from all kinds of backgrounds to find meaning in couture, be it in a gallery or a runway show, is something van Herpen values. That the Paris version of Sculpting the Senses was one of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs’s most visited shows proves people agree there are many parallels between art, culture and fashion.
“That’s also a way to connect people because it wasn’t just a fashion audience, it was people from so many different disciplines and backgrounds. It’s really beautiful to bring such a crowd into an exhibition that ultimately is, of course, about couture, but it’s more than that. It’s really about the relationships between all of these people and all of these disciplines.”
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is at QAGOMA, Brisbane, until October 7. Annie Brown travelled to the exhibition as a guest of the museum.
