The exhibition, which ran from November 29, 2023 to April 28, 2024, was a huge success: over 100 gowns were presented at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD) in Paris, some of them worn by actresses Nathalie Portman, Eva Green, Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swinton, as well as singers Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Björk, and more recently Isabelle Huppert at the theater. The exhibition was extremely well attended, with 370,780 visitors.
Iris van Herpen, 40, is a Dutch fashion designer. Her breathtaking creativity is rooted in a fusion of digital technologies, traditional haute couture craftsmanship and biosphere-inspired shapes and materials.
Dresses for visionary artistic expression
The visit immediately raised a question in my mind: “This dress made of glass lace in the image of diatoms, microscopic algae with glass skeletons and fascinatingly fine and complex shapes, how is it possible to wear it?” But that’s not the point. Here, the vehicle of artistic expression is not painting or body sculpture, but the dress on a woman body. And finally, fashion shows and exhibitions show that models can wear these dresses, which then transform their bodies and their relationship to the world.
The dress, a complex interface between body and world
These dresses form a silent but very intense link between the body and the world around it. They are not “simply” made to dress a body, to enhance it. Some dresses seem to weave the real beyond the body, with often very fine and complex ramifications in glass or paper, in a wide variety of materials and shapes. They extend the body into space, creating an aura and ultimately transforming the body’s intimacy and proximity to its environment.
The world of the 21ste century is one of technological transformation of human interaction. And this without regard for our physical bodies, since these interactions take place primarily via sound and screens. The body, on the other hand, is the object of fashion and clothing. Perhaps paradoxically, they appear as a space of resistance to these mediations. They work on the way our clothed bodies present themselves, expose themselves, interact with the world and with others. At a time when billions of digital devices have invaded humankind, the Fashion Week shows underline just how marginal digital technologies have remained in the fashion world to date.
A new form of interaction
Digital technologies are essential to the creation of Iris van Herpen’s dresses. She explores a form of symbiosis between the world of craftsmanship linked to sewing, textiles and all supple materials as described by textile designers or the Compagnons du devoir, and the world first created by physicists and chemists, that of additive manufacturing with 3D printers, laser cutting and digital controls, that of the FabLabs.
It’s a platform of astonishing creative power, but also of fascinating delicacy, when it comes to working with a wide variety of rigid or flexible materials, and on a wide variety of scales, from the size of a human body to the limit of the visible, that of diatoms (microscopic organisms living in water).
In this video, we also clearly see the extent to which the symbiosis built between these two worlds only exists through the human gestures that enable the most delicate assemblies.
Drawing inspiration from the living and playing with scale like a physicist
In the form of documentation, a very rich and diverse collection of pieces and samples is on display, highlighting materials and forms in all their diversity and sophistication. It is on this basis that Iris van Herpen can deploy all her references to living things, mushrooms, plankton, corals and jellyfish.
These inspirations enable her to emphasize in her dresses the ramifications, the organizations at different scales that physics and mathematics have worked out with scale invariance. Here, in her collaboration with artist Rogan Brown, I see her questioning this very powerful and astonishing scientific concept formalized through the notion of the fractal.
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Bérangère Dubrulle, physicist and winner of the Académie des Sciences’ Irène Joliot-Curie prize in 2022, illustrates this magnificently by following the vortices in their tracks:
“There are vortices at the quantum level. At the metre scale, we see them, betrayed by soap particles, when we empty our bathtub. Zoom out further: vortices, again, shake the atmosphere with their wisps of water vapour: these are hurricanes. Embrace the entire universe, and galactic vortices dominate the cosmic landscape.
Using digital tools, haute couture craftsmanship and biomimicry, Iris van Herpen can explore, create and work with ramifications, bifurcations at the limit of the visible, right up to the size of the body and its environment.
And while she obviously can’t grow a dress, she insists on the universality of growth phenomena on all scales, particularly within living organisms. What if human-made and Nature-grown were indistinguishable?” is the headline on artist and designer Neri Oxman’s website, so we’re not surprised by their collaboration.
Dress and science
If Iris van Herpen has invited artists to exhibit alongside her, scientific references are everywhere: anatomical drawings by Santiago Ramón y Cajal describing neuronal structures in the brain (Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1906 with Camillo Golgi “in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system”), a sumptuous image of a giant detector at CERN in Geneva with a model dressed in one of its gowns in the foreground. Images from the Hubble telescope show the shapes of objects in the universe, beyond even Iris van Herpen’s audacity. Here, on the one hand, we see a wealth of scientific research in a wide variety of fields contributing to the designer’s inspiration and the construction of multiple, highly varied visions. And, on the other hand, alongside the guest artists, science comes here as an additional revelation: it’s all about the interactions between us and reality, at different scales, different temporalities, organic or not, conscious or unconscious.
Dialogue between arts and sciences
Iris van Herpen’s work brings to mind these words by Jens Hauser in a curatorial proposal entitled “From performance to microperformativity”:
“The concept of microperformativity denotes the current trend in performance art to destabilize the usually dominant place of the human scale. It interrogates the microscopic world and its biological and technological agents as new actors in art.
At a time when performance is taking on an ever-greater role in art, these contemporary experiments in microperformativity redefine what art, philosophy and the technosciences consider a ‘body’ today, by inviting new actors: genetic sequences, cellular mechanisms, bacteria, fungi, enzymes and other proteins, ‘vibrating matter’ from physics, but also high-frequency trading algorithms or the deep learning networks of artificial intelligence.”
Iris van Herpen reveals an open, permeable humanity, in all its relationships with the outside world, with living beings of all shapes, sizes and environments.
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