“Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses”: blockbuster exhibition in Paris
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The Paris Museum of Decorative Arts is hosting the exhibition “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses.” The exhibition turned out to be an example of the interaction of natural objects, sculptures, documents, paintings – with dresses, which this environment accepted, elevated and filled with meanings and feelings.
Iris van Herpen and her famous skeleton dresses, shell dresses and crystal dresses are quite a curious phenomenon. The designer, who will only turn 40 this year, gained early and great fame – by the end of the 2000s she was declared a new couture star, and in 2009 Lady Gaga wore her dress (and then did so more than once). And then, 15 years ago, it seemed that Van Herpen was making something unprecedented, a breakthrough into the future of couture: these are the unprecedented designs that couture should now produce in computer laboratories, and not tinker with its crafts.
However, now that everyone can work with 3D printing, which she was the first to use in fashion and which has become her trademark, the situation looks somewhat different. The main question heard both at the exhibition itself and in social networks when discussing it: “Are Van Herpen’s dresses made using AI?” – and it can hardly be considered complimentary. Indeed, her passion for technology and the narrow focus of her aesthetics and practices turn her work into a series of predictable repetitions that look (no, they are not) the product of artificial intelligence with its marked style: this is how we roughly imagine outfits invented by a neural network.
This impression is aggravated by the fact that Iris van Herpen mainly deals with one silhouette – narrow and rigid, with an exaggerated waist and hips. This silhouette was not invented by her, but by Alexander McQueen, with whom she interned immediately after graduating from the University of Arnhem in 2006. It was revealed to us at the show of his great collection SS 2010 Plato’s Atlantis – like the aesthetics of supercreatures in general: either those who flew from outer space, or rose from the bottom of the sea, or hatched from some fateful eggs – they are all from there, from McQueen’s Atlantis . But if McQueen’s imagination was almost limitless and super beings were just one of his fantasies, then Iris van Herpen is a designer of one theme. The McQueen imprint becomes especially clear when we get to the shoes and accessories, which in some places look like direct quotes from that same Plato’s Atlantis collection.
Her second most important source is Thierry Mugler. The van Herpen sea anemone woman stands on display at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in almost the same place where the bird woman stood two years ago in the exhibition “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime”. But here it is no longer a matter of similarity, but rather of difference. In feathered dresses, snakeskin dresses, butterfly dresses, tire dresses and even Mugler’s shell dresses, a woman certainly had to look like a sexual object – in Iris van Herpen sexuality was completely washed out, taken away, with new meanings that were supposed to be filled the same forms are not entirely clear. Well, his virtuosic camp aesthetics were also much more diverse than her computer fantasy.
In short, the work of Iris van Herpen did not have a particular influence on fashion, but the exhibition was conceived as a big event (the opening was attended by Brigitte Macron and the Dutch Queen Maxima, dressed in a dress specially sewn for her by van Herpen based on one of those on display) and , thanks to curatorial efforts, took place partly in this capacity.
The set design of “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses”, like all the recent blockbuster exhibitions of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, was done by the Nathalie Crenier agency. The entire exhibition is built on a dialogue between dresses and objects – in most art objects of a wide variety, from engravings and natural science atlases of the 18th-19th centuries to modern art, pieces of furniture and naturalistic objects – skeletons, shells, shells.
Contemporary art here is very diverse – a lot of three-dimensional objects, but there is also video, modern dance, and sound installations, some of which are special orders made by artists with whom Iris van Herpen collaborates. For example, the Japanese art collective Me created a new version of their work, located in the Mori Museum in Tokyo, representing the frozen surface of the ocean with its endless black depth. Together with natural objects (corals, shells), as well as watercolors by the French naturalist and artist Charles Alexandre Lesueur (a blue Portuguese boat), this black mass creates one large installation, inside which dresses are placed, becoming part of it, clearly brought to life by the same Portuguese boat and other sea creatures.
The adjacent room contains art objects of a wide variety of natures, materials, techniques and eras: the silver shell sculpture Nautilus Panta by the Belgian Wim Delvoye, inside which a Gothic micro-cathedral is hidden; cocoon made of glass and beeswax Seed of Narcissus by Slovakian Tomas Libertini, real honeycombs Yuansu Series II – #12–2, inscribed by the Chinese Ren Ri into a polyhedron; fantastic multi-layered objects cut out of cardboard by Briton Rogan Brown. There is also a fundamental study by biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel “Kunstformen der Natur” (1899–1904), dedicated to marine fauna, with his own illustrations displayed on a separate screen. All this forms a solid frame that holds the dresses placed there, and holds it both compositionally and conceptually, accepting and lifting them and, as it were, sharing its own aura with them. And some of the monotony of Iris van Herpen’s techniques is compensated by this symbiosis of objects of art and objects of nature.
The entertainment value of this exhibition is undeniable, as is the success of all its creators. However, all the art that helps her dresses has already been brought here, and in order to again capture the imagination of the audience, she herself will need to experience some kind of metamorphosis.
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