What on earth is she wearing? How weird fashion lands in your wardrobe

Weird fashions get such a hammering, particularly on social media. “Pointless”, “Nope” and “Where would you wear it?” are pretty typical among comments on any post with, say, an oddball Iris van Herpen, a strange Schiaparelli or anything, really, on a Rick Owens runway.

There’s also a doctorate’s worth of theories about why so many scoffers and trolls are genuinely angered by offbeat and “conceptual” clothes: “Bahaha!! F*&#@ing Stupid!!”, for example. There are measurable levels of loathing for fashion in those !!!s.

Vogue legend Anna Wintour once observed that some of us feel threatened by fashion. We feel self-conscious and judged and, in our deepest doubting selves, fear getting our fashion choices wrong which – stringing that theory to its rim – could mean a “nope” to being liked or, god forbid, even loved.

It’s all horribly complicated but it’s also this madly human tangle of psycho-social baggage that we bring, not only to our own wardrobes but – crank that up and add steroids – to the weird stuff academics and fashionistocrats charitably call “ideas-driven” fashion.

“If you’re walking into an exhibition, or you’re seeing some outlandish, extremely artistic thing being worn at an awards ceremony by a celebrity you like,” explains associate professor Lauren Rosewarne of the University of Melbourne, “remember you’re going to bring a different set of judgments to that than something you might see in Kmart.”

Iris van Herpen’s Ananda-Maya gown, 2022, left, and Schiaparelli’s Look 6 from the Matador Couture collection 2021-22 can be seen at this year’s Triennial.

Which brings us neatly back to Schiaparelli and Iris van Herpen and their spots in the National Gallery of Victoria’s sprawling multi-floor Triennial exhibition, opening next week. The Schiaparelli group of 20-odd surrealist-inspired accessories and gowns is by American designer Daniel Roseberry, the current creative director. His tether to the mythically visionary Elsa Schiaparelli, who established her legacy fashion house almost a century ago in Paris, is obvious.

Schiaparelli’s offbeat aesthetic and collaborations with artists Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and others echo in spatters of celestial iconography and the elegant body bits strewn across Roseberry’s collection.

Designs by Maison Schiaparelli featuring at this year’s NGV Triennial: jacket (top) and jewellery bustier from the Matador Couture collection.Credit: Courtesy Maison Schiaparelli

He’s cast eyes, noses and lips into gold jewels and spectacles, for example, and disturbingly witchy fingers and toe extensions. A golden face mask requires the wearer to bite into it to keep it in place, and a – whaaaaat!? – “brooch” features full-sized maternal breast with feeding golden baby attached.

A model wears Schiaparelli couture for the autumn 2022 fashion show in Paris.Credit: New York Times

Roseberry’s work also resonates with his “celebrity darling” status, a golden goal since he joined the house from quirky US brand Thom Browne in 2019. He set out to dress A-listers, and did just that and more every season: Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, a string of Kardashians (who could forget Kylie Jenner’s lion’s head frock from January?).

From left, Gwendoline Christie in Iris van Herpen, Kylie Jenner in Schiaparelli and Janelle Monáe in van Herpen.Credit: Getty Images

Lean in to the shimmering, thickly beaded gold mini gown Beyonce wore for Vogue, for example; it’s his miracle of haute couture craftsmanship. Or a black silk coat from his spring/summer 2022 collection (also showing at NGV), sharply schlooped into actress Gillian Anderson’s waistline by a cunning arrangement of gored panels (an invention of Elsa Schiaparelli), not corsetry as you might expect, with gold embellished “ghost corset” heavily embroidered into the front.

Enigmatic Dutch designer Iris van Herpen’s Triennial exhibit, “Ananda-Maya” from her autumn/winter 22/23 Meta Morphism collection, is equally spectacular. She created it in all-white materials with a central spindly carapace of twisting, thickly embroidered synthetic ribs anchoring tendrils of stiffened mesh that appear to roil and swirl like smoke around the body. Matching 3D printed platform shoes are spiky and white as bleached coral.

The beauty is strange, utterly impractical. “How would you sit in that,” was overheard at van Herpen’s haute couture show. Only the right-sized celebrity heading up the right red carpet or the most intellectually engaged of her haute couture clients with a lazy $100,000 (I’m guessing) could possibly give Ananda-Maya, or almost any other van Herpen, a fair crack at practical use as a fashion garment. An item of clothing, in other words. Bahahaha!! indeed.

Clockwise from main: Iris van Herpen with a dress from her 2016 collection in her Amsterdam atelier; a staff member works with laser cut fabric frames; the Ananda-Maya gown features in this year’s Triennial.Credit: New York Time, Iris van Herpen

On a video call with van Herpen, 39, from her Amsterdam atelier, she ranges across all the ways that mystifying fashions like hers and Schiaparelli’s might be, if not understood, then at least accepted with less angst by mere mortals.

“Even if it’s difficult for someone to consciously understand the concepts, even if they’re not familiar with the inspirations behind it, and if they don’t know me, haven’t read a single interview about me, the [designs] are strong enough ... that they can still feel and translate on an emotional level,” she offers.

Van Herpen’s pale face looms, appropriately ethereal as a Renaissance madonna’s, loosely framed by long unstyled hair, out of the fogged-out Zoom backdrop. She’s soft-spoken, precise, quick to smile, immediately likeable.

We talk about open minds, gut feelings (the best tools to observe baffling fashions), and how marvellous it is when certain celebrities on red carpets and runways act as “bridges” or “conduits” between the aghast public and some of her wackiest (my word, not hers) iterations and out-there ideas.

“Their braveness and energy brings my work to life,” she says of Lady Gaga, Bjork, Zoe Kravitz, Janelle Monáe and the many other “brave” celebrities who have ignored the scoffers and trolls and agreed to be buckled, clamped, stitched, fused, heat-bonded or moulded into the latest van Herpen. Actress Gwendoline Christie, for example, (the towering Lady Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones), once described climbing into a van Herpen as “being bound up in the technology of what it is to be alive”.

Van Herpen and I also talk about how, in woke-speak, exhibitions such as the Triennial can offer a “safe space” for minds to open and gut feelings to blossom around weird-looking outfits. Which raises the mildly annoying question that journalists (not me) ask most often: “Are you an artist or a fashion designer?”

“I would not know why you have to choose,” she says. “It can easily be both. In history it was common for an artist to be also, for example, a scientist, but nowadays people really want to understand which box you are in.”

There is no box to house van Herpen. Up to 18 mind-blowing designs a season emerge from the all-engrossing collaborations she nurtures with physicists, biologists, academics, technicians, artists, architects, musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, milliners. She fuses couture craft with technologies, often in airy designs that are laboriously invented by trial and error, micro-success and micro-failure.

Iris van Herpen: “I’m always looking for timelessness.″⁣Credit: Courtesy of the artist

She was the first designer to investigate 3D printing and hand-casting. She laser-cuts, blow-torches, shreds, fuses, moulds, and creates previously unthought-of materials. She experiments with electricity, sound, water, anti-matter, magnetic fields. Once, she and Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf shrink-wrapped models into clear plastic envelopes and suspended them from the ceiling. Post-show she was shrink-wrapped herself.

Van Herpen’s designs invariably end up in museums and galleries more often than wardrobes. No surprise there. The point of their pointlessness as fashion designs is their payload of ideas, everything from cultural diversity to the knock-on effects of climate change, salty and snapping fresh from the zeitgeist.

“But definitely my own personal zeitgeist,” she corrects. Van Herpen is at pains to explain her criteria for new projects does not include the zeitgeist’s blips, fads and flashes-in-the-pan. “I’m always looking for timelessness. For example, a concept like aquatic architecture – I’m interested in this now – will be going through an evolution in the coming 50 years.”

Arcing across all van Herpen’s work is her constant experiment with fashion’s core tenets, especially its traditional notions of femininity and beauty. “The exploration of femininity is really key to everything I do,” she says. Her designs are unarguably beautiful, but in unexpected ways. Ananda-Maya, for example, may be an exquisitely hand-crafted high-tech haute couture ode to experimental materials and the human struggle with self-realisation in a world of merging digital and physical identities (feel free to jot that down), but it is also gut-punchingly gorgeous.

So, gloriously stupid, or simply glorious? It depends which side of the fashion divide you land after looking closely and weighing all you now know about van Herpen with that tangle of psycho-social baggage mentioned earlier.

NGV fashion and textiles curator Katie Somerville equates van Herpen, Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli and other “brave minds” like theirs to fashion’s equivalent of a research and development department.

“Like any field or industry, you’ve got this laboratory of ideas,” Somerville says. “It’s those exciting, brave minds that want to explore things that haven’t been played with before.”

She and co-curator in the NGV’s fashion and textiles department, Danielle Whitfield, have clocked a combined 50 years acquiring these disruptive designs that ping in the zeitgeist, mark their moment in history and, one way or another, push fashion’s slow, messy, back-and-forth process of evolution forward by a whisker or six.

“I guess it’s almost instinctive,” Somerville says of the complicated mechanics, “but you do build up a visual bank [of fashion] in your head.”

If you’re puzzled at this point by what exactly fashion evolution is, use the “powdered wig” inquiry for enlightenment. Across centuries of (European) civilisation, how did we get from primitive skins, to medieval hopsack, to Rococo crinolines and powdered wigs, to modern micro-frocklets and jeans’n’Ts?

Chip, chip, chip is the answer. “There’ll be some element, some small gesture that people will absorb,” says Somerville of the NGV’s apparently baffling exhibits. “It might be a colour palette, a material, accessories ... but it’s something they’ll feel comfortable adopting themselves when they feel creative.”

The University of Melbourne’s Lauren Rosewarne says “it could be feathers or certain prints”. “Without fully understanding that that outfit, intact, is not actually ever going to be sold to you; it might take quite a while but bits of it, details, will end up at your local shopping centre.”

And so fashion evolves: disruptors disrupt, hardened fashionistocrats, plucky celebrities and adventurous dressers snub the scoffers to adapt their designs and make them their own, a pall of public acceptance descends, more and more people wear the weird and, voila, ideas once considered gloriously stupid are slowly normalised. Just glorious.

The Triennial is at NGV International, December 3 to April 7, 2024. Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is at Brisbane’s QAGOMA from June 29 to October 7, 2024.