Season after season Dutch Iris van Herpen has been creating unique designs that have combined different disciplines together from art and architecture to science and technology in very innovative ways.
Yet quite often, though beautiful and mesmerising, her exoskeletons and futuristic constructions were considered by critics as certainly worthy of museum exhibitions, but rather impractical and unwearable in real life.
Fast-forward to Paris Haute Couture Week (that closed on Thursday) and you realise the designer has been working hard to make her creations softer and more functional, while managing to retain an avant-garde edge about them.
For her S/S 19 collection - entitled "Shift Souls" - van Herpen came up with 18 looks, some of them inspired by the colours of early examples of celestial cartography such as the star atlas Harmonica Macrocosmica (1660) by German-Dutch cartographer Andreas Cellarius.
The "Harmonic" section of the collection included voluminous spheroid dresses with curved wing-like elements characterised by vibrant patterns through translucent gradient-dyed organza plisse-ed by hand.
Additional inspiration for the colour palette came from former NASA engineer turned artist Kim Keever, who's known for his photographic and acquatic expressionist experiments.
Keever usually pours house paint into a fishtank and takes pictures of the abstractions created by the colours as they mix and mingle in the water. Ephemerality and movement are the principles behind these images.
Van Herpen collaborated with Keever on translucent layered cloud designs - dubbed the "Cosmica" dresses - that seemed to freeze in a garment the ephemerality of his signature work. Vaporous colored clouds by Kim Keever were printed on translucent organza that was then employed to create layered mille-feuille like designs with a gaseous or nebulous consistency about them.
The shapes of the dresses included in the collection were borrowed from the possibilities of DNA engineering and human/animal hybrids.
"For 'Shift Souls' I looked at the evolution of the human shape, its idealization through time and the hybridization of the female forms within mythology. Specially the imagination and the fluidity within identity change in Japanese mythology gave me the inspiration to explore the deeper meaning of identity and how immaterial and mutable it can become within the current coalescence of our digital bodies", the designer stated in the collection press release.
Gradient-dyed silks were multi-layered into sculptural shapes by a fine 3D lasercut frame of PETG to create concentric layers echoing the configurations of topographic maps.
At first the layered designs looked as if they were just distorting the contours of the body, but then you realised they hid shapes and forms like anamorphic faces or birds among the multi-layered silks heat-bonded within frames of lasercut mylar. In the looks closing the collection the layered birds seemed to be bursting out of the models' bodies, modifying their anatomies.
The 3D printed "Cellchemy" face-contouring jewellery (of the kind Björk favours...) completed the collection. The pieces were developed through a generative design process based on a 3D face scan: a semi-arbitrary density structure was mapped from the face by combining the colour information with the 3D shape in grasshopper algorithm. The designs were created through a high-resolution multi-material printer in collaboration with the Delft University of Technology.
The show closed with a light installation by contemporary artist Nick Verstand who divided the space using walls of laser lights; a laser beam was also projected on the hems of the dresses and traced the footwear for a unique glow-in-the-dark effect.
As a whole, while the inspirations behind the collection looked at a distant future, the techniques and fabrics still pointed at the codes of couture.
Yet, while the combination of colours such as ochre, purple and indigo and the softer materials were unusual for van Herpen's standards, biggest surprises await her fans in the next year or so, including a major exhibition in Paris in 2020, a new book and an architecture project (rumours say it may be a natural history museum in The Netherlands). Looks like van Herpen's passion for couture will soon evolve into something else, just like human and animal DNA may mingle one day to create hybridic creatures.
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