Winning an award is always a reason to celebrate, but last weekend Iris Van Herpen had a double reason to celebrate. The fashion designer won indeed two prizes at the Dutch Design Awards.
The flexible 3-D printed garments in her "Voltage" Haute Couture collection, showcased in Paris in January 2013, won her the "Product - Best Fashion" category (Irenebrination readers will be happy to know that Christien Meindertsma's book The Collected Knitwork of Loes Veenstra won the "Product - Best Autonomous Design" category; you can check out all the winners here).
Van Herpen also won the Golden Eye Award. The selection committee stated about the Dutch designer's "Voltage": "With this collection, Iris van Herpen once again unites different worlds: architecture, technology, fashion and 3D printing. The committee highly appreciates her connective strength and crossover approach. This is what we want to see in the world: designers working together. Moreover, the result is stunning."
As highlighted in this statement, the award could be considered as "a collective prize" since the "Voltage" designs are the result of a collaboration with architects Philip Beesley and Julia Koerner, and Neri Oxman, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab.
"Iris’s Golden Eye Award is particularly encouraging, because it implies that the risk of opening up to other disciplines can be a source of growth and refreshment; it invites an optimism of spirit," Canadian architect and sculptor Beesley told Irenebrination via email.
"Of course working with hybrids and multiple technologies requires you to carefully listen, and tread carefully as well. But that still seems contrary to the sense that we are only consumers and that we damage and that we use and that every step that we take is somehow at the expense of something else. Fertility seems to define this new couture."
In "Voltage" Iris van Herpen explored the "electricity of the body" and topics such as strength and movement, but also space and therefore the relationship of the body with what surrounds us.
"In our conversations, I found myself relating to vestment in Iris's studio as being a kind of 'possibility space' that wraps in multiple layers around a body and reaches outward into multiple octaves of space," Beesley recounts.
"We tend to speak of hovering and resonating, and seething and hardening and cloaking. Recently, we’ve been speaking of making clothing and buildings by controlling energy charges. The greatest intimacy seems wound up in touches of trembling exposure. That movement starts to be not just outward but also inward, suggesting traffic under and above the skin, implying both intimate play and also emotional wrenching."
While fans of Beesley may easily spot in Van Herpen's "Voltage" references to his fascinating and fantastically futuristic structures, the architect says his recent work has been directly influenced by the dialogue with Iris.
"This past year, the exchanges motivated practical development of new fabrics that went into the 'Voltage' collection, including a halo-like cloud of delicate translucent fronds softly wrapping around our bodies, and a new 3D lace made from acrylic and silicone that inverted a normal architecture where you have rigid skeletons and then tension elements inserted within that. Our own bodies have a network of sinews and muscular fascia around a skeletal structure, suggesting a hovering, vitally poised system of interlinked components. Similarly, the new fabrics worked to create shivering cross-currents responding to intimate touch."
The two awards won by Van Herpen prove that hybrid researches into the architecture and fashion fields can lead to stimulating results, and help designing innovative fabrics, structures and materials. Hopefully in future we will see more clever collaborations along these lines.
Image credits for this post: Iris Van Herpen's "Voltage" collection by Michel Zoeter; images of Philip Beesley's "Epiphyte Veil", a next generation large scale geotextile work, © PBAI
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