This
morning, Iris van Herpen presented her latest couture collection in Paris, and
it’s fair to say we won’t see anything like it the rest of the week. The
couture calendar got a jolt of energy last July when Van Herpen left the
ready-to-wear world and showed her first made-to-measure outing. Her work—which
you’ll recognize from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Manus x Machina”
exhibition—fuses science, technology, art, and real-life clothing, which is
quite different from the hand-embellished gowns you typically associate with
the haute couture.
For her
second-ever couture show, Van Herpen collaborated with Berlin-based artist
Esther Stocker on a collection of 3-D-printed dresses, wavy pleated gowns, and
a startlingly beautiful finale look, which seemed to be made of drops of water.
Every one was meant to trick the eye; Stocker’s art often makes you see linear
connections that aren’t there, so Van Herpen focused “on the gaps in between
the structures of my materials, rather than the structures themselves.”
“This dress
was made through an extensive process of six different phases,” Van Herpen
tells Vogue.com. “[We started by illustrating] the pattern on the computer,
which was then sent to the laser-cutting company to cut it into several pieces
of plexiglass. Those ‘2-D molds’ were then sent to the vacuum-molding company,
which vacuum-shaped the laser-cut molds into several ‘3-D’ molds.
“Those 3-D
molds were then hand-cast with a liquid transparent PU with an iridescent foil
on the back,” she continues. “This process is very time-consuming and takes
eight hours of drying time for each mold. In the meantime, another team was
shaping by hand and hot air the PETG, which functions as the invisible
construction to make the dress float up in the air, with several hot-air guns
and metal pliers. The heat shaping was done mostly through improvisation. Many
fittings were needed before finalizing the right shape. After that, all the PU
molds were hand-stitched onto the invisible PETG construction, then hand-stitched
to the tulle dress underneath.”
If you were
to see the final product up close, you might notice that each “water drop” is
like a magnifying glass—look through one and your vision is warped. The entire
dress took 1,400 hours to complete and weighs about 33 pounds, but Van Herpen
isn’t really worried about how women will wear (or buy) it. Like her pieces
displayed in “Manus x Machina,” it’s a work of art not a commercial item, and
she says it would be nearly impossible to re-create. “As the heat-molding
process is not fully predictable, there was no pattern used,” she says. “The
PETG is hand-shaped on the mannequin over a period of several weeks, so even if
we tried to, it would be impossible to ever make this same dress again.”
"Such
emphasis on the material and process might sound clinical, but in fact the
opposite is true. Yes it’s precise, carried out with the meticulous rigour of
aesthetically motivated scientists, but there is a warmth there – a naturalness
even. The human touch is very apparent, concepts go through dozens of rounds of
changes and development. Ideas are traded between Van Herpen’s base and
Beesley’s. “We tend to share emerging concepts in many cycles, trading
sketches, digitally fabricated prototypes and trial mockups. We send things
back and forth between our Toronto and Amsterdam studios in a flow of
deliveries, Skype meetings and emails, and make the most of working directly
together when we can. The constant dialogue between our studios makes a kind of
collective intelligence that allows us to tackle new technologies,” Beesley
says, observing that actually touching and playing with materials can’t be
bettered. “It is striking just how much practical information comes from
playing with real materials at full scale, touching them and seeing how they
affect our own bodies… By the end several long days and nights, the entire
studio is completely filled with new possibilities… To me, Iris’s curiosity
seems boundless, with literally hundreds of interim studies, we approach
something very close to natural evolution.”
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