Usually Iris van Herpen's Haute Couture runways are not endless and boring presentations, but they feature a coherent selection of well-edited designs. At the same time, though brief, her shows hide a lot of information for what regards the stories that inspired the collection and the materials and techniques employed to make it.
Take the A/W 2019-20 collection, showcased yesterday at Élysée Montmartre in Paris during Haute Couture Week. The first thing to discover was the kinetic sculpture on the runway, by Anthony Howe.
The American artist, who won this year an award at the 12th Florence Biennale, is known for his works in stainless steel with fiberglass disks that move. His pieces are considered similar to sentient beings as they breathe and come alive with the wind, replicating the energy and force of nature.
His "Omniverse" sculpture on Van Herpen's runway was an ode to nature, meditatively and calmly (two adjectives that definitely do not go well with the fashion industry...) moving in an ethereal way to symbolise the cycle of life.
The sculpture also acted as a portal for the models and contributed to create a state of hypnosis in the audience. "Hypnosis" was indeed the title of this new collection, interpreted as a hypnotic visualisation of nature's tapestry and of the cycles of our biosphere that interweave the air, land, and oceans.
Multi-layered transparency was one of the keywords to decode this collection, that included "Epicycle" looks built from luminous organza spheres, creating illusory patterns that wrap into each other infinitely; "Suminagashi" designs evoked instead the art of Japanese floating ink on water, with liquid lines of dyed silk, laser-cut and heat-bonded onto transparent tulle to seamlessly flow over the skin.
The "Dichotomy" looks were instead laser-printed, heat-bonded and laser-cut into contra-positive waves. Each dissected curve was then pressed onto hundreds of ripple-like panels ebbing and flowing in hand-stitched silk organza.
The "Hypnosis" technique was developed with Van Herpen's long-term collaborator, architect Phillip Beesley: printed duchesse-satin is plottercut into thousands of mini 0.8mm interlinked ripples that continuously dissect the dress, revealing the skin of the wearer in between the spheroid patterns and designed to move faster than the eye can follow.
This technique is usually applied to designs that feature more than one colour or printed pattern, this means that, when the wearer moves, the dress becomes alive, so that one colour morphs into another, causing visual disruptions as if a pattern were melting in front of your very own eyes (the same technique was employed for the Jordan Roth's Loïe Fuller-evoking Met Gala look).
These designs proved that Van Herpen has gone from strength to strength, turning her once rigid 3D printed experiments into more wearable and pliable structures, and establishing a proper Haute Couture atelier, with just one difference compared to more traditional workshops - her studio has a unique and strong link with artists, architects and scientists.
The final design, dubbed the "Infinity" dress, was a mini "Ominiverse": thanks to a finely balanced mechanism that turned around its own axel (it took four months to make this design) the aluminum and stainless steel exoskeleton with delicate feathers that surrounded the dress kept on perpetually moving in a hallucinatory way.
The kinetic structure strengthened the hypnotic effect of the larger "Ominiverse" on the runway, while metaphorically hinting at our complex environment, at the world revolving, and the rhythms of life continuing, with years, months and seasons passing in a fluidly relentless and maybe somewhat fatalistic way, prompting the Haute Couture fashionistas to re-shift their attention not just on the technologically advanced yet hand-crafted designs on the runway, but also on the fragility of our planet.
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