By this point in her 16-year career, Iris Van Herpen has defied so many preconceptions and limits in the realm of dressing the body that challenging herself further meant considering another construct altogether.
She has grown and engineered materials and imagined water in wearable form. She has sent her dresses soaring through the air (on skydiver Domitille Kiger) and plunged them under water. Two months after her awe-inspiring exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs drew upwards of 370,000 visitors—among the museum’s highest turnouts—she invited us to discover her series of “aerial sculptures.”
Within a gallery-like space, her presentation, called Hybrid Show, featured just nine works: five were the haute couture gowns that appear in these photos. As a twist on the tableau vivant, they appeared like actual artworks with the models emerging from the impasto-covered canvases. Fixed in place and stabilized by the protruding shoes, they moved as though conjuring the natural world. Coco Rocha swayed interpretatively from on high, shaking her head when I asked whether she could speak.
Unsurprisingly, the workmanship was exceptional: rhythmic bursts of pearls; a transparent, filigreed structure moulded by a heat gun into glass-infused organza; an ethereal pattern of constructed lace that fused with floaty silk; a lustrous reimagining of a kimono as a bronzed dress with intricate pleats and folds.
The remaining four works, not shown here, revealed Van Herpen’s foray into a purely artistic practice. Unlike the solid canvases, these were filmy scrims to which she applied fragments of solid oil paint, thick like lava; airy draped tulle; and diaphanous, hand-pleated silk. “It has been a natural next step for me, to show my vision of fashion and art and how they can actually live in the same universe,” said the designer, who will receive the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, awarded by the French Ministry of Culture, on Tuesday.
Beyond the reductive binary of fashion and art, Van Herpen, a trained dancer, played throughout with the duality of sculpture and dance—static versus animated—while a soundscape composed by her partner, Salvador Breed, encouraged us to absorb the works as she absorbs the garden they have created together outside of Amsterdam.
“I tried to capture time in the artworks, but also the performance itself, where I have been working on these sculptures for six months, even a year,” she said. “I really want people to find their own time with them; not to see them for two seconds on a runway, to give people more freedom in the way they experience the work.”
The experience was transportive yet limited to being there. Around the 45-minute mark, the models made their exit. Lily Cole’s young daughter, who had been sketching the entire time, was reunited with her mother. Suddenly the canvases were empty save for the embedded shoes. But Van Herpen’s suspended tulle sculptures remained like ineffable variations on a self-portrait.
