Iris Van Herpen

Showcases Iris van Herpen’s visionary fashion, where craftsmanship, technology, and nature converge to create posthuman couture and sculptural innovation.

Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen (1984) is renowned for her innovative designs combining sartorial craftsmanship with cutting-edge technology. She rose to fame with her first three-dimensional (3D) printed dress from the collection “Crystallization” in 2010. Rapid prototyping enabled Van Herpen to materialize digital designs with a 3D printer, producing elaborate folds without the need for needle and thread. The then-new technology of 3D printing produced a unique intricacy of 3D folds.

She graduated from Fashion Design at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem. and from her very first fashion shows she creates a synthesis between fashion and art, science, nature, and technology. Van Herpen always looks for collaboration: with artists, musicians, architects, and scientists; she even worked with the Swiss scientific research facility CERN. Having trained as a dancer in her youth, she loves fashion as an embodied art form and has designed daring costumes for modern ballets.
• Van Herpen’s designs merge the artificial with the organic, performing biomimicry in shaping dresses like spider webs, coral reefs, the rhizomic roots of fungi, undulating waves of water or smoke, marine organisms, or the dendrites and synapses of neural networks. Recently, Van Herpen has ventured into sculptural art, creating monumental yet ethereal textile installations made of tulle, silk, and 3D-printed elements.

In this book, Anneke Smelik shows that Van Herpen’s highly technological designs can be considered posthuman fashion, as they feature the intertwining relationship between the organic and the inorganic. Van Herpen creates a posthuman aesthetic that is relevant for today, as her innovative designs produce encounters between craftsmanship and technology, the organic and inorganic, and between art and nature. Her most recent material innovation shows again her flair for combining art, science, and nature: in her collection “Sympoiesis,” she made a “living dress,” made of 125 million bioluminescent algae that can only be kept alive with the greatest care. Van Herpen’s posthuman fashion highlights the interdependence between humans, nature, and technology. In creating folds, rhizomes, and entanglements, Van Herpen’s designs open up to an understanding of life as an infinite play of becoming—a dance of materials.