An introduction to ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’

Tue 4 Jun 2024

Iris van Herpen draws inspiration from the depths of the ocean, the mysteries of the universe, the endlessly regenerative forms of nature, our bodies as we move, and visions of humanity in a distant future. As an artist and designer, she is an acknowledged visionary of the twenty-first century. In her hands, fashion is being redefined, moving beyond the boundaries of prescribed femininity to something more open, daring, and transformative.

DELVE DEEPER: Journey through ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’

Watch | Who is Iris van Herpen

Watch | Iris van Herpen in conversation

Watch | Journey through ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’

QAGOMA presents a major survey dedicated to the pioneering Dutch fashion designer, the first solo exhibition of her work to be seen in the southern hemisphere. A collaboration with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’ invites us into the designer’s universe, featuring 130 items including garments, accessories, and other sources of inspiration from across her career, arranged according to nine enduring themes: Water and Dreams, Sensory Sea Life, Forces Behind the Forms, Skeletal Embodiment, Growth Systems, Synaesthesia, Mythology of Fear and New Nature. The final room — Cosmic Bloom (illustrated) — explodes in a riot of colour, with mannequins positioned sideways and upside down to suggest the cosmos as a place of unrestrained freedom: a new horizon for humanity.

Cosmic Bloom

Conceived as an immersive sensory experience by Musée des Arts Décoratifs curator Cloé Pitiot with Louise Curtis, ‘Sculpting the Senses’ is a fashion exhibition like no other. Otherworldly and futuristic garments reveal van Herpen fusing traditional craftsmanship with cutting-edge technologies such as 3D printing (Escapism top and skirt, from the ‘Escapism’ collection 2011 and Skeleton dress, from the ‘Capriole’ collection 2011 illustrated), and unconventional materials, including umbrella ribs, iron filings, resin and blown glass. She has been called ‘haute couture’s chief scientist’, a ‘sorceress of style’ and an ‘avant-garde technologist’ for the way in which she creates an entirely new language that synthesises ideas from many different fields, encompassing ancient mythology and alchemy, marine biology and quantum physics.

Iris van Herpen ‘Escapism’ top and skirt 2011

Iris van Herpen ‘Skeleton’ dress 2011

Mirroring the designer’s expansive imagination, the exhibition follows a journey from the microorganisms of the deep sea to the outer reaches of the cosmos. Van Herpen’s designs are placed in dialogue with contemporary artworks (such as Whispers Wall by Megan Cope, PixCell-Double Deer #4 by Kohei Nawa, and Malum Geminos by Courtney Mattison, illustrated); natural history specimens such as corals, fossils and skeletons, centuries-old manuscripts; nature documentaries, and other cultural artefacts to explore the many influences on her practice. Juxtapositions of the old and the new are further distilled in the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ room (illustrated), in which van Herpen’s outrageous shoes, face jewellery and headpieces are interwoven with taxonomies of insects and nineteenth-century botanical drawings, referencing the eclectic displays of worldly treasures that emerged in northern Europe in the sixteenth century.

Iris van Herpen & Megan Cope

Iris van Herpen & Courtney Mattison

Iris van Herpen & Kohei Nawa

Cabinet of curiosities

At the heart of the exhibition, an evocation of the designer’s atelier — situated in a converted former coffee depot with large windows overlooking Old Wood Harbour in Amsterdam — offers insights into the rich formal and material experimentation that underpins the creation of each piece. Three mannequins demonstrate the stages of a dress in development, while samples of 3D-printed materials — the fruits of a longstanding collaboration with Canadian architect and multidisciplinary designer Philip Beesley — illuminate a focus that valorises the creative process as much as the finished garment: ‘The end is for other people but the process is for me’, van Herpen acknowledges.^[1]

Iris van Herpen & Philip Beesley ‘Hypnosis’ cape-dress

Whether engineering materials grown by the forces of magnetism, running three million volts of electricity through a dancer’s body to animate a garment through vibration, or exploring the possibilities of 3D-printing (in which embedding duration into the design of a dress would enable a time-based metamorphosis), van Herpen’s work is defined by her restless innovation:

A lot of my concepts and inspirations come from materials that I cannot work with, like smoke and water, elements that I will never truly be able to create a garment from. That impossibility inspires me.^[2]

‘Water and Dreams’ theme

Encountered in ‘Water and Dreams’, the first chapter of the exhibition (illustrated), are works from her acclaimed ‘Crystallization’ collection of 2010, in which she examines the shape-shifting states, structures and patterns of water, from its liquid form to the precise beauty of its ice crystals. The design process for the Water dress involved filming the life-giving substance as it was thrown at a live model in slow motion, then suspending its splashes by heat-molding and hand-sculpting PETG (a type of thermoplastic polyester). Other garments, such as the Seijaku and Frozen falls dresses (illustrated), resemble ripples, flows, flurries, waves and waterfalls, deploying a range of materials from silicone, stainless steel, simax glass, cotton, organza, mylar and tulle to capture water’s transparency and mutability. Of her radically experimental process, van Herpen observes:

In the beginning when you work on a material, the material is controlling you, and after a while you are controlling the material. That transformation is an exciting moment . . . it’s a beautiful process, where chaos is an integral part of the design.^[3]

Iris van Herpen ‘Hydrozoa’ dress 2020

Iris van Herpen ‘Morphogenesis’ dress 2020

Van Herpen’s receptiveness to chaos, illogic and intuition informs a design process which is not so much about making a statement but more to do with proposing fashion as a possibility, question or challenge. Her deep curiosity about the world and interest in extending the frontiers of fashion has led her to collaborate frequently with other pioneering thinkers in the fields of architecture, dance, biology, choreography, physics and visual art:

Collaboration can be a nice tool to open up your skills and open up your mind . . . the whole world can be in my studio if it has to be.^[4]

This collaborative, transdisciplinary ethos also characterises her relationship with her various ‘muses’ — groundbreaking creative women such as Björk (illustrated), Lady Gaga (illustrated) and Tilda Swinton, for whom she creates her haute couture. One of her most meaningful collaborations has been with her partner, sound designer Salvador Breed, whose atmospheric soundscape weaves throughout the exhibition, combining classical and electronic sounds with recordings from nature, further layering the sensory experience. Two of van Herpen’s most vital creative wellsprings are the living world and the human body in motion, reflecting her early childhood passions for nature and classical dance. ‘Being a dancer, Iris has a deep connection to the physicality of the body — its strength, creativity, and ability to convey emotion,’ remarks Pitiot.^[5]While her designs have often been referred to as ‘sculptures’, van Herpen herself perceives them more like dances, suggesting she views fashion as a dynamic practice: ‘For me, many of the pieces aren’t complete if they’re not moving. The garments come to life when they’re worn’.^[6]

Iris van Herpen ‘Anemone’ dress 2012 worn by Björk

Iris van Herpen ‘Sensory Seas‘ dress 2020 worn by Lady Gaga

Philosophical enquiries into the body’s movement through time and space, its rippling energies and continual transformation are extrapolated to the interdependent relationships between all living things. Organic, rhythmical silhouettes suggest the intricacies of a mollusc’s shell, the honeycomb formation of a beehive, or the vibrational energies at work within the Large Hadron Collider (the most powerful particle accelerator in the world). The beauty and intelligence of the generative system by which mushrooms weave connections through filaments of mycelium inspires dresses born out of biomimicry — the idea that nature and its systems are a primary source of inspiration and innovation in design, science and technology.

Since establishing her eponymous label at the age of 23, Iris van Herpen has chartered her own course with a singular and uncompromising vision. Born in the village of Wamel in the Netherlands, she studied at the interdisciplinary ArtEZ University for the Arts in Arnhem before undertaking a formative internship with iconic British fashion designer Alexander McQueen in London. Since 2007, she has honoured her commitment to slow and sustainable fashion from her intimate Amsterdam atelier. Despite eschewing the expansion typical of many other fashion houses, van Herpen’s work has had global impact, collected by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, and many other museums worldwide.

‘Sculpting the Senses’ reveals the avant-garde beauty and wonder of Iris van Herpen, a truly transformative force in the world of fashion.

Nina Miall is Curator, International Art, QAGOMA
This text is adapted from an essay first published in QAGOMA’s Members’ magazine, Artlines.

The exhibition is co-organised by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris and QAGOMA, Brisbane, based on an original exhibition designed by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’ / Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) Brisbane / 29 June to 7 October 2024, across the ground floor in The Fairfax Gallery (1.1), Gallery 1.2, and the Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery (1.3).

Featured image: Iris van Herpen, Netherlands b.1984 / Labyrinthine Kimono dress, from the ‘Sensory Seas’ collection 2020 / Glass organza, crepe, tulle, Mylar / Collection: Iris van Herpen / Photograph: David Uzochukwu / © David Uzochukwu

Endnotes

1. ^ Iris van Herpen, quoted in Charmaine Li, ‘Iris van Herpen: The Unknownness of Everything’ [interview], mono.kultur, no.47, 2019, Berlin, p.20.
   
2. ^ Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses [exhibition catalogue], Lannoo, Belgium, 2024, p.28.
   
3. ^ Quoted in an interview with Sarah Schleuning in Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion [exhibition catalogue], High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and Groninger Museum, Groningen, 2015, p.10.
   
4. ^ Quoted in an interview with Sarah Schleuning, p.14.
   
5. ^ Cloé Pitiot, quoted in Stephanie Sporn, ‘For Iris van Herpen, fashion’s intrepid explorer, anything is possible’, https://www.artbasel.com/stories/iris-van-herpen-dutch-fashion-designer-couture-musee-arts-decoratifs-paris-2024, accessed 22 March 2024.
   
6. ^ Iris van Herpen, quoted in Charmaine Li, p.23.