Dutch designer Iris van Herpen featured her newest couture collection “Wilderness Embodied Haute Couture” at Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week. The wilderness and animal attraction was the starting point in the collection. She sustained a good balance between craftmanship and innovation. The designer focused on the exploration of organisms and exoskeleton in silicon dresses. For the colors, she sent out metallic, shell-like structures that engulfed the upper body, she also fused a japanese style in a bronze kimono dress with fragile cutout patterns. They resembled walking sculptures.
Iris van Herpen often collaborates with scientists or technologically advanced companies. This time to create the collection, she worked with an artist Jolan van der Wiel, who keeps exploring the nature forces of gravity and magnetic fields. In addition, Iris van Herpen and shoe designer Rem D Koolhaas, a founder of the shoe brand United Nude, together designed 3D-printed shoes that looked like tree roots.
More than ever before, there was an element of wearability introduced here that bridged the research and concepts that the Dutch designer has been working with and their application in a more approachable setting. Explored a-fresh through her first ready-to-wear launched in March, along with a necessary democratization of technical know-how, her work breaks down the barriers between garment and art piece. At the end she always looking to the feature like scientist, who first makes a discovery, then later on, it becomes a reality. (Text Teuku Ajie)