Brigitte Macron and Princess Maxima attended the Iris Van Herpen show: skeleton dresses, shells, magma

A retrospective exhibition dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the fashion house of the Dutch designer Iris (Iris) Van Herpen (she is not even forty) is being held these days at the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts. Its opening was attended by the First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron, and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands, wearing a dress specially made for her in Van Herpen’s signature style. Visitors may have a question: is all this futuristic splendor, cold beauty devoid of the breath of life, the fruit of artificial intelligence?

At the exhibition “Iris Van Herpen. Sculpting Feelings” presented about 100 innovative works with 3D printing and many other technological wonders. The body is inscribed in space, interacting with or opposing clothing. This is the trick to watch.

Each dress does not exist on its own. It is built into the environment, the most incredible. There is a semblance of black lava, reminiscent of anthracite waves, and the illusion of outer space, where mannequins and fabrics float in weightlessness. Whimsical and seemingly frozen into oblivion, Van Herpen’s works enter into dialogue with works by other contemporary artists, installations, photographs, and engravings selected for several worlds. There are eight or nine of them. It depends on how to count and what to see in them, how to determine the boundaries.

Visitors walk along the “rivers” that separate them from lifeless figures in magnificent decoration, past sculptures, ancient artifacts from Morocco and other countries from the collection of the Museum of Decorative Arts, crystals, a cocoon of wax and natural honeycombs, through labyrinths, a gallery of images of a Brazilian architect and Japanese designers. The world is multifaceted, and we live in it.

The fantastic theater of mannequins seemed to have frozen, plunged into a dead sleep. The designs are so complex that it is impossible to imagine how anyone could wear it? However, Bjork, Lady Gaga, Celine Dion, Tilda Swinton, Natalie Portman appeared in Van Herpen’s costumes, and this can be seen on the posters decorating the staircase.

At some point during their journey, visitors find themselves in the Amsterdam atelier of Iris Van Herpen and can view the materials and accessories with which she works. They are placed on vertical stands under a transparent canvas covering them like a cloud. You can sit down for a few minutes and watch the broadcast of the shows, the catwalk and behind the scenes, the preparations for the show, as well as the work of the skilled craftsmen who make up the young and international team. They cut out, separate, connect, glue something unimaginable, and as a result, before our eyes, a bizarre creation is born, created for the catwalk, not for life. This is how the “Sensory Seas” collection is born, dedicated to the neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner, the Spaniard Santiago Ramon y Cajal. This is not an atelier in the usual sense, where seamstresses sit at machines, but rather a computer laboratory, like we saw in futuristic films.

Bizarre creations were created not only under the influence of modern artists, but also the natural sciences, the achievements of scientists and architects. The dresses seem to be woven from coral, fossils dating back hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, these are recycled plastics, polymers. Sometimes it seems that we are at the bottom of the sea, in distant galaxies, inside a science-fiction film.

Fashion and science – physics, archeology, biology. Fashion and art – choreography, which Van Herpen has been doing since childhood, photography, painting… The dresses are complex, they were not easy to design. Here you have to be an engineer rather than an artist.

Iris Van Herpen grew up in a Dutch village, and therefore should be close to nature, but there is precisely no naturalness and triumph of life in her works. They are like still lifes. She studied with Alexander McQueen and the Dutch textile artist Claudie Jongstra. She is interested in the topic of the origin of life on Earth, the trauma that humans inflict on the planet every time. Van Herpen thinks planetarily.