Iris van Herpen doesn't so much design clothes as invent them. In her Amsterdam-based atelier, van Herpen, 32, fuses centuries-old haute couture craft with pioneering materials, creating clothing - skeletal 3D-printed polymers, dresses of magnetic resin or floating laser-cut feathers - that's as innovative as it is beautiful. Take her autumn/winter collection, debuted at Paris Fashion Week in July. Inspired by cymatics - the process of visualising sound - the collection includes a dress constructed from thousands of handblown, silicone-coated glass bubbles. Others are laser-cut to mimic sound waves; another, a Japan-inspired shibori dress, is woven from polymer threads lighter than human hair. "To me, it's important to create something where I am challenged," she says, "and that stretches the possibility of making."
Van Herpen grew up outside Amsterdam - "without any television or computers" - before studying at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem. After graduating, she interned at Alexander McQueen before launching her own label in 2007. In these early days she became one of the first couture designers to experiment with 3D printing. "It completely changed my process," she says. Her creations start not with a shape, but with a material. Van Herpen's studio has many projects in development at any one time, and frequently collaborates with companies and designers - the architecture Philip Beesley, MIT's Neri Oxman - on new techniques to use in its creations.
Van Herpen doesn't draw with a pencil ("it's too flat"), instead moulaging directly on to a mannequin. As a child, she wanted to be a dancer, to which she attributes her designs' dramatic, sculptural forms. Her work is then digitised, "I first make it by hand in the atelier, then we 3D-scan textures and start working with them on the computer," she says. "It's the more natural way." The new technologies are blended with traditional couture techniques - hand-stitching and sewing patterns. "If there is a dress that involves 3D printing, it always involves handwork in it," she says. "My work isn't just about technology. It's a tool. The craftsmanship is just as important."
To date, her creations have been worn by Beyoncé and Björk, and displayed in museums around the world (including the Met in New York this summer). Among commercial collaborations, she is also working on a book, and thinking about emerging technologies such as 4D printing.
For van Herpen, it's about more than just aesthetics. Fashion, she explains, has the capability "to challenge the way we think, and the way we make something".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
