Iris van Herpen. Sculpting the Senses.

Over a hundred dresses in Paris

From 29 November 2023 to 28 April 2024, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris showed Iris van Herpen. Sculpting the Senses in its Christine and Stephen A. Schwarzman galleries. The curators were Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis. The space was designed by Studio Nathalie Crinière.

It gathered over a hundred haute couture pieces by Iris van Herpen. But the dresses did not stand alone. They were placed beside contemporary art, design, and objects from natural science, like a naturalist's collection room.

Iris van Herpen was born in 1984 in Wamel, the Netherlands. She founded her house in 2007 and joined the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris in 2011.

Nine sections, nine ways of looking

The exhibition had nine sections. Sensory sea life. Water and dreams. Forces behind the forms. Skeletal embodiment. Growth systems. Synaesthesia. Alchemic atelier. Cabinet of curiosities. Cosmic bloom.

Read the list and you see that van Herpen's sources lie outside fashion. She looks at the sea, at bone, at how living things develop. Then she asks: can a dress follow those rules?

Her answers are shapes that are hard to name. Dresses like frozen waves. Bodices like a thin skeleton around the body. Transparent layers stacked like the membranes of something that lives under water.

Materials and making

The list of techniques reads like a laboratory. 3D printing. Laser cutting. Glass blowing. Thermoformed Plexiglas. Suminagashi, the Japanese art of marbling ink on water. Electromagnetic weaving. Transparent leather cast by hand.

Suminagashi is an easy example. Ink is floated on water, left to drift with the current and the breath, then paper is laid on it to hold the pattern. No one draws the pattern. The water draws it. The maker only chooses when to stop. Many of the dresses here carry that same spirit.

Some pieces were made with people from outside dressmaking, such as a bodice in 3D-printed polyamide made by laser sintering, with Daniel Widrig and Materialise. For van Herpen, the machine does not replace the hand. It opens shapes the hand cannot make alone, and then the hand finishes them.

What matters is that the techniques are not shown off as technology. They disappear into the shape. You see water, bone, roots, before you think of a printer.

Those standing alongside

Van Herpen chose to stand beside many other artists and designers. The exhibition included work by Philip Beesley, Collectif Mé, Wim Delvoye, Kate MccGwire, Kohei Nawa, Casey Curran, Rogan Brown, Neri Oxman, Ren Ri, Ferruccio Laviani, Tomáš Libertíny, David Spriggs, Kim Keever, with the choreographer Damien Jalet and the architect Jacques Rougerie.

Each brings their own view of matter and movement. Together they show that van Herpen does not stand alone in a corner of fashion. She belongs to a wider conversation about how people learn shape from nature.

The relationship between fashion and the natural world was also the subject of an exhibition in London: Fashioned from Nature.