I have a long list of designers I would like to interview that includes famous/commercial designers as well as up-and-coming/edgier artists. Among the latter there’s Iris van Herpen. Her creations intrigue me and I have placed her name in my top five designers to interview.
Van Herpen graduated in 2006 from the Arnhem Art Academy and since then she has created outstanding collections that prove she has a passion for craftsmanship as well as for researching different and unusual materials that she often uses to make conceptual outfits. 
The first collection that came to my attention was the one entitled “Fragile Futurity” featuring outfits that could be described as fit for an Amazon, a half woman-half animal superhuman being. I loved the white tops and trousers entirely made of silk-thread, but also the black dresses covered in long black hair and van Herpen’s mutant-like dominatrixes who seemed to have long black or white ponytails protruding from their shoulders.
Van Herpen developed the animal theme further in her Autumn/Winter 2008-09 “Chemical Crows” collection inspired by crows and by her fascination for alchemists. While the latter transformed lead into gold, van Herpen worked on turning crows into the precious metal, covering her rather linear dark grey, black or beige dresses with fan-like structures entirely made of thin brass rods taken from children’s umbrellas. These ethereal metallic wings paired with high-heeled shoes covered in brass rods gave the wearer the impression of being a sort of bird-like woman.
Last Friday van Herpen presented her “Refinery Smoke” collection at the Amsterdam Fashion Week. The whole collection is based on two colours – grey and gold – though greys prevailed, as if the designer wanted to turn again the gold of her previous collection into lead.
Different shades of warm and cool greys were used for cloud-like mini-dresses, shiny pale grey fringes were used instead to create dresses for Third Millennium flapper girls and hundreds of intricate twisted threads decorated high-heeled sandals that showed the designer’s care for minute details.
Having worked for Alexander McQueen as an intern, critics often claim that van Herpen has been heavily influenced by the British designer. Yet van Herpen is probably less theatrical than McQueen, and she is able to create outfits for darker and more mysterious women, for femmes fatales who are a strange melange of good and evil and who are also quintessentially quirky, extraordinarily powerful and deadly sexy.
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