Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion

Untreated woven metal gauze, cow leather, and cotton
Groninger Museum, 2012.0196
Photo by Bart Oomes, No 6 StudiosRefinery Smoke is based on the astonishing beauty, the ambiguity, and above all, the elusiveness of industrial smoke. Seen from a distance, smoke provides a fascinating and dynamic spectacle: at times it seems to be alive, but it also harbors something sinister and can even be toxic. Van Herpen has manifested these ideas in a metal gauze that she had specially woven for the Refinery Smoke collection. The material, which is unusual in the fashion world, consists of innumerable fine metal threads. The dresses started as silver gray but have oxidized over time to a reddish-brown, serendipitously reflecting the dual nature of industrial smoke.

Lacquer leather, cow leather, gold foil, metal eyelets, busks, and cotton
Groninger Museum, 2012.0202.a–b
Photo by Bart Oomes, No 6 StudiosVan Herpen approaches the body as a malleable, sensitive, and fragile object. With Synesthesia, she enlarges body parts through transparency, movement, and extreme repetition to emphasize refined craftsmanship. Starting from a vision of the future in which clothing might supplement or strengthen sensory perception, van Herpen has designed certain elements—such as hypersensitive, vibrating instruments or extra receptors—that enable the wearer to experience the world in an entirely different way. Using specially treated leather coated on one side with shiny metal foil, she created a striking and bewildering visual effect that makes it difficult for the viewer to recognize exactly what he or she is seeing.

Transparent polyethylene terephthalate, ECCO leather with oil treatment, goat leather, silver chains, and viscose
Groninger Museum, 2012.0206.a–b
Photo by Bart Oomes, No 6 StudiosThe design for the new extension to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, which earned the nickname the bathtub, inspired Iris van Herpen’s Crystallization collection. She sought to design a dress that would cascade around the wearer like a splash of water. She initially wanted to 3-D print the dress, but technical limitations made it impossible to achieve the transparency she desired. She ultimately chose to create the work completely by hand, using hot air guns and metal pliers to manipulate a transparent substance. After testing nearly forty different materials, she settled on polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a malleable resin commonly used to make plastic bottles. Using this process, van Herpen painstakingly molded the acrylic into undulating cascades that evoke the movement of water.

In collaboration with Julia Koerner and Materialise
3-D-printed UV-curable polymer
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase supported by the Friends of Iris, 2015.170
Photo by Bart Oomes, No 6 StudiosFor this design, van Herpen was inspired by an early Dutch illustration of a fractal (a geometric form that can be divided into parts, each of which is a smaller copy of the whole). She collaborated with Austrian architect Julia Koerner to achieve the design’s detailed repetition.Belgian 3-D printing firm Materialise printed the dress using stereolithography. This process constructs the design slice by slice from bottom to top in a vessel of semi-transparent polymer that hardens when struck by a laser. The resulting complex of honey-hued planes seems to grow increasingly intricate as it extends outward from the body.

In collaboration with Jólan van der Wiel
Iron filings, polyurethane resin, and cotton
Courtesy of the designer
Photo by Bart Oomes, No 6 StudiosTo create this dress’s crater-like topography, van Herpen worked with Dutch artist Jólan van der Wiel. Inspired by physics and gravity, van der Weil developed a material comprising iron filings mixed into molten plastic. Using magnets that attract the metal filaments, he shapes the material into stalagmite-like forms. Van Herpen sought a softer, more flexible version for a collection of dresses, shoes, and accessories. The pair collaborated to create this rubbery, pearlescent substance that could be applied to fabric in small sections and stretched into forms evocative of a lunar landscape.

In collaboration with Niccolò Casas and 3D Systems
3-D-printed transparent photopolymer and stereolithography resin
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Decorative Arts Acquisition Trust and through prior acquisitions, 2015.82
Photo by Bart Oomes, No 6 StudiosEarly in 2014, Iris van Herpen and Philip Beesley visited CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to see the Large Hadron Collider, whose magnetic field is 100,000 times more powerful than Earth’s. Van Herpen was fascinated by this interplay of magnetic forces.Italian architect Niccolò Casas was van Herpen’s collaborator to finalize her design for this crystalline dress, whose front and back snap together. The company 3D Systems produced the transparent dress using stereolithography. In this process, a beam of ultraviolet light is focused onto the surface of a vat of liquid polymer. The design is created as the material comes into contact with the light, hardening it layer by layer. Pushing the technology to new limits, the printing company ultimately succeeded in producing a dress whose transparent ribbons of resin recall the shimmering surface of ice.