One of Fashion’s
Most Innovative
Designers
Iris van Herpen, who weaves cutting-edge technology
with couture craftsmanship, brought T to Texas.
“I think a lot of people, when they look at my work, they see the future, but what I find interesting is that it is actually all present,” said the 32-year-old Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, who is known for her innovative designs that interweave cutting-edge technology with couture craftsmanship. “I cannot make something that isn’t there yet. Everything that I do is here and now.”
Van Herpen may be designing for the immediate present — albeit a visionary one that most of us have not yet reached — but her first ever trip to Dallas, Tex., had her traveling back into her past for the most recent opening of her exhibition “Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion” at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Wearing a jumpsuit from her Magnetic Motion collection and well-worn platform boots (“I think they’re Louis Vuitton something”), van Herpen made last minute tweaks to the looks on display, reattaching interlocking 3D printed pieces, fluffing metal gauze and adjusting the spines of children’s umbrellas reborn as wire neck pieces. “Seeing it all together, it’s almost like walking through your own diary,” she said.
“Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion” is now on view at the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Credit Allison V. Smith
The show spans nearly the full career of the designer, presenting three looks each from 15 collections starting with her second, Chemical Crows, which debuted in January 2008, and concluding with Hacking Infinity from March 2015. Arranged in chronological order, the exhibit allows visitors to experience van Herpen’s process of exploration as she builds from collection to collection on the ideas, techniques and materials that have been on her mind since the beginning. “Every collection is a follow-up on the previous one, so all together they create the story, and you really feel that in this installation,” she said. The story she is telling is one of big ideas, limitless experimentation and an uncompromising dedication to the highest standards of craftsmanship.
Van Herpen is the first to point out that her position at the nexus of fashion and the most innovative technology is something of a contradiction. The designer grew up in a small village in the Netherlands without a television or a computer, and she remains uninterested in tech in her personal life. Yet since the 2007 launch of her brand following an internship with Alexander McQueen, she has been collaborating with a wide range of disciplines, from science and technology to architecture, to invent new materials in order to achieve her desired effects in design.
Allison V. Smith
She was the first to send a 3D printed garment down the runway (“I had no idea that it would actually work on the body. It was an experiment and I actually received the piece just a few hours before the runway, so it was quite stressful”), and her collections are often inspired by heady concepts like the process of water turning from liquid to solid, the effect of electricity on the body or the transformative experience of sky diving.
As van Herpen explored Dallas in her hours off from museum duties, the easygoing nature of the soft-spoken designer, who once aspired to be a dancer, belied her clearly voracious appetite for inspiration. She quietly examined a Calatrava-designed bridge, visited the philanthropist (and DMA patron) Deedie Rose at home to have a look at her unparalleled jewelry collection and enjoyed some Tex-Mex. (All of these activities were accompanied by soft exclamations like “cool” and “oh, nice.”) One can only imagine how such experiences are churned into the wholly original ideas that end up on the runway.
Fashion may be her medium of choice, but van Herpen’s designs are as much at home in a museum as they are on the runway. This fact hasn’t escaped the notice of savvy art curators like Mark Wilson and Sue-an van der Zijpp from the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands and Sarah Schleuning from the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, who first teamed up to bring “Transforming Fashion” to life in the U.S.A. in 2015. In 2016, van Herpen also caught the attention of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which included several of her looks in their blockbuster exhibition “Manus x Machina” — and acquired six pieces for their permanent collection.
The fashion world may view van Herpen as a pioneer, but she is quick to put her work into perspective. “I feel technology, in a way, already has been a part of fashion for a long time — like everything we wear is made by machines. It just sometimes needs to be updated a bit to connect to the world around it again,” she said. And while her use of technology is a foundational — and often mind-bending — aspect of her work, just as compelling is her dedication to the painstaking hand craftsmanship that characterizes traditional haute couture. “I could not express myself without the help of technology or without the help of the handwork. If one of the two would not be there, it would not make sense,” she said.
“I see fashion as something that doesn’t have one shape. I think that’s the space that I’m exploring where I can touch fashion, where I can touch art, where I can touch science, where I can touch architecture,” she said. “And I think the freedom that I take to make the work should also be the freedom that the viewers get.”
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