Form-freeing Dynamics at the Intersection of Duality

Fashion, as defined by Merrian-Webster, is the prevailing style during a particular time and is often associated with how one dresses. Iris van Herpen redefines what is fashion and, frankly, what clothing can be made from.

Born in the Netherlands, van Herpen grew up surrounded by bodies of water and often spent time with nature. Her interactions with the natural world would become part of her foundation as an artist. Van Herpen is also inspired by movement. Trained as a ballet dancer for almost two decades, van Herpen is drawn to the dynamics of movement and the process of creating movement. Starting her brand in 2007, van Herpen began showcasing some of the most boundary-breaking collections in the fashion world. Shortly after she created her brand, van Herpen became the first designer to make a dress using three-dimensional printing. Inspired mainly by science and technology, van Herpen often works in collaboration with other artists. Her openness to materials that are not traditionally considered clothing allows van Herpen to extend beyond the current definition of fashion and lean towards the arts. Open people or people with great openness to experience, as defined by Smillie, are “intellectually curious, creative and imaginative.” Van Herpen falls into the openness category. She is constantly observing and learning about the different disciplines that are not traditionally intersected with the fashion world. In 2014, she visited CERN, a center for particle research, and toured their Large Hadron Collider.

She observed the construction of the collider and the hand-wiring process which inspired her collection for the spring of 2015. Van Herpen created the ‘Magnetic Motion’ collection with laser-cut acrylic mesh to represent the magnetic field produced within the Large Hadron Collider. She does not shy away from materials that others claim to be insufficient for creating collections. Instead, she embraces them. In her January 2017 Paris Fashion Week collection ‘Between the Lines,’ van Herpen comments on the patterns in her designs and how the distortion of the patterns from movement represents imperfections in the physical and digital worlds. When the models wear these designs on the runway, the patterns are distorted, creating, basically, a glitch in the overall pattern of her design. In addition to her commentary that intersects art and technology, van Herpen also implements this unique intersection in the creation process of her collections. 



For her ‘Between the Lines’ collection, van Herpen used new techniques: hand-crafted, three-dimensional polyurethane fabric that is hand-painted through injection molding and laser cut Mylar fabrics. These techniques helped the designs achieve the glitch-like effect that van Herpen connects between the physical and digital worlds.

Van Herpen’s unique intersection of digital and physical reality is also shown by her ‘Water’ dress. She, in collaboration with Daphene Guinness and Nick Knight, took photos of water being thrown onto Daphene and distorted the water in the images to create the base design of the ‘Water’ dress. 

Finding inspiration in anything from images under an electron microscope to the magnetic pull of a particle collider, van Herpen continues to push the boundaries of fashion. 



https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openness-to-experience-the-gates-of-the-mind/ 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/25/iris-van-herpens-hi-tech-couture#targetText=Several%20years%20ago%2C%20Iris%20van,small%20city%20in%20the%20Netherlands.

https://www.irisvanherpen.com/home

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fashion