The word “otherworldly” is often used to describe the works of Iris van Herpen. It is high praise, but it also overlooks the fact that the Dutch fashion designer draws plenty of inspiration from the very world we live in. This much is clear at Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, a retrospective of her works that is now showcased at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore.
This isn’t your typical fashion exhibition, because van Herpen isn’t your typical fashion designer. Since starting her label in 2007, she has explored the possibilities of clothing with the obsessive and inquisitive nature of a rocket scientist.
Van Herpen is one of the first fashion designers in the world to create 3D-printed garments, including a wedding gown. She also constructs her couture creations with laser cutting, silicone moulding and water-jet cutting—techniques that are usually used in industrial manufacturing. She collaborates with artists and scientists alike in her atelier in Amsterdam, which she calls an “alchemic laboratory”. The fruits of van Herpen’s experiments, presented at Paris Couture Week, are fascinating and strange: her sculptural dresses move on their own, her shoes glow in the dark, and her gowns possess the symmetry and hypnotic quality of optical illusions. Her designs have shaken up the dusty world of haute couture, which has seen few innovations since the days of Cristóbal Balenciaga.
It makes perfect sense, then, that after Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses debuted in 2023 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the exhibition is now presented at the ArtScience Museum—an institution that examines art and culture through their relationship with science and technology.
At the media preview of her exhibition in Singapore, van Herpen emphasised her multidisciplinary approach to haute couture, saying, “I don’t believe fashion stands on its own. I see fashion as being in dialogue with all the layers of life around us. It’s in dialogue with society and the transformations happening within society. It’s in dialogue with our environment, with philosophy, with art, with science. [With this exhibition,] I’m trying to [materialise] these invisible connections between fashion and all the other realms.”
Indeed, Sculpting the Senses does this well. Alongside 140 of van Herpen’s creations, the exhibition showcases plenty of curios: the drawings of human neural networks by the neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal; illustrations of microorganisms by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel; and an array of fossils, corals, animal skeletons, marine specimens and taxidermy insects. The latter is unique to the Singapore exhibition, and includes loans from the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum.
“Nature is a very important influence in my work,” shared van Herpen. The exhibition reflects that with its nine themes, like “Water and Dreams”, which showcases pieces from her Crystallization collection for Spring/Summer 2011, inspired by different states of water. In the “Skeletal Embodiment” section, visitors will have the novel experience of seeing a 270-million-year-old fossil of a dimetrodon in the same room as van Herpen’s Skeleton dress, from her Fall/Winter 2011 haute couture collection.
Besides connecting van Herpen’s designs to her inspirations—which, she shares, are so vast that it was difficult to distill them to just nine themes—the exhibition puts the spotlight on her creative process. For example, in the “Alchemic Atelier” section, visitors get a glimpse inside van Herpen’s workspace in Amsterdam.
“I don’t start with a concept or a drawing,” shared van Herpen about creating a new collection. “I start by experimenting in the atelier on new materials and structures. For every collection, we have hundreds of samples.”
The Alchemic Atelier section features a small portion of those samples from van Herpen’s archives, rearranged into a beautiful rainbow. The next step of her creative process can be seen in the “Cabinet of Curiosities” section, where miniature mannequins are draped with early prototypes of van Herpen’s designs.
“The exhibition [offers] a different way to experience my work,” said the designer, who considers the creative process as sacred, and a form of meditation. “There is more time to really understand the craftsmanship, innovation and the amount of time that goes into each piece. A lot of people don’t realise that it’s haute couture; one design can take up to four to five months for a whole team to create.”
The exhibition closes with “Cosmic Bloom”, where van Herpen’s colourful Shift Souls dresses from Spring/Summer 2019 are displayed sideways or even upside down because, she explained, “I wanted my works to be without gravity, floating into space.”
“I think freedom is something that comes back into my work a lot,” said van Herpen, who has previously presented her couture creations on models submerged in water, and on a skydiver in the middle of a freefall. “[Freedom is] finding a new space within fashion on how we perceive ourselves, and how we create and recreate our identities.”
Van Herpen also asserts her own identity as an artist by showcasing her sculpture, Unfolding Time, at the exhibition. Inspired by the idea of how time stretches when she spends it in nature, the sculpture features spiralling silk and tulle pleats intertwined with fossil-like forms, all suspended in mid-air. It is one of the aerial artworks that van Herpen unveiled at her Fall/Winter 2024 haute couture show.
“It’s really important for me to stretch people’s perceptions on what fashion can mean and how I can express myself freely without [being bound to] a discipline,” she said. “That’s also what I hope that people will take away from the exhibition, that they don’t have to choose whether this is art or fashion. In my mind, they live in the same universe.”
The exhibition also shows us how van Herpen’s “otherworldly” designs, dreamed up in her brilliant mind, can in fact be realised in our world. Her tireless commitment to her vision puts her in the same league as Björk and Lady Gaga, two women that van Herpen has dressed and who she said embody her works. She elaborated, “I really feel that they are fearless in how they express themselves; they have created their own universe.”
With her immersive and expansive exhibition, van Herpen invites us into her own universe. She shared, “The exhibition is called ‘Sculpting the Senses’ because I think that, ultimately, this is what my work is about—triggering the different senses of the body, into a new experience.”
In the exclusive interview ahead, Iris van Herpen tell us about her ambitions as a fashion designer and artist, her decision to present one haute couture runway show a year, and what the future of fashion looks like.
Let’s talk about fashion exhibitions. You have staged a retrospective of your work, and one of your designs is currently showing at the Louvre’s first fashion exhibition. When you were starting out as a designer, did you go to fashion exhibitions a lot?
Iris van Herpen (IVH): Definitely. I saw some fashion exhibitions when I was younger. Also, my parents took me to museums a lot in general, as well as to dance performances. I’ve been very lucky that that has been part of my whole upbringing, and that my parents found that really important. I don’t think I would be doing what I’m doing now if I did not experience that at a very young age.
From those experiences, were there any fashion designers who stood out to you?
IVH: One of my biggest inspirations, still, is Alexander McQueen. I did my internship [at his label]. He was so much more than a fashion designer. He was an artist, and he really put his heart and soul into his work. You can feel that in all of his designs. They share this singular DNA; when you see his work, you recognise it’s his. I think that’s very powerful. It’s very difficult to see that in fashion today because the brands are shifting designers around all the time; you lose that soul and that DNA that can be shaped if you have [a designer with] the luxury of going into it for many, many years. That creative DNA is so personal. I have been focusing on mine for a very long time. For me, it’s a really big compliment when people can tell that it’s an Iris van Herpen design without seeing my name. They recognise it from the DNA of the design. I find that really important.
Do you feel that you have had to fiercely protect your creative process from the business of fashion, and from the fast pace of the industry?
IVH: Absolutely. It has really been a big focus for me. Alexander McQueen is one example, but there are many examples where you see [what happens when] the business takes over. If there is an artist involved, it can be very destructive. It is so easy to sell your soul. It is so easy. And it’s so hard to protect your creative freedom. But that’s something that I have put a lot of effort into. I’m still independent, and that’s the biggest luxury I can have [as a fashion designer]. I can make my own decisions, and I’m really grateful for that.
In January, you announced your decision to stage only one couture show a year in order to focus on research and development. Why did you make that decision after doing this for so many years?
IVH: I am now in a position where I can do that. I’ve always done a lot of research and development in my work, and that process is more important to me than the end result. I think it’s all a balance between expectations and having the ultimate creative freedom. I am very happy that I have followed this system for a long time. I’ve done two shows a year for 17 years. I think that that was needed, and also to show that we [as a label] can do it. [We can achieve] this balance between art and couture and business. But I think that if I had made this decision five years ago, it would not have been the right time. I think now is the right time. We are a grown-up label, and we can make those decisions and be an example for other brands as well. And I think that my decision to do one runway show is something that came out of working on this exhibition. [It allowed me] to make more time for the exhibition but also [to explore] the architectural and sculptural side of my work.
In putting together this retrospective, did you discover something new about your own designs and creative process?
IVH: Yeah, absolutely. It’s really interesting to work on an exhibition like this because you zoom out on your own work and your own process, and you have to extract what is really important. What is the essence of what I’m doing? You get to look back, which I normally don’t do because I’m always working on the next thing. But I learned a lot. I think that with this exhibition, I’ve only become more free in the way that I make my decisions. While I was working on the exhibition, the seeds of my sculptures were born as well. I realised that even though I’m working so much with other disciplines, I didn’t give myself the freedom to go beyond the body, which I really needed to do as well.
You chose to present your retrospective in Singapore. Does the city inspire you in any way?
IVH: It’s my first time in Singapore. But what I have already seen and that I admire a lot is that architecture and nature come together so naturally here. I only wish that Amsterdam and Paris [where I live and work] have that. It’s so important for our mental health to have that balance. I feel that Singapore has created a symbiotic relationship [between architecture and nature] and I hope that it will be possible to bring that to Europe.
What are you currently researching?
IVH: I’m diving more into living materials. Ultimately, all the materials that we wear are dead. We want fashion to be regenerative, to have a sense of life and to be part of the cycle of nature. Of course, the first stage of this improvement is to have all the materials be recyclable or regenerative. But the next stage—which still requires a lot of research and development—is to actually make the materials alive. I’m working on that at the moment. I think the deep sea is a very big inspiration for me [in this research] because there are some organisms that can express their emotions so vividly. That’s really the ultimate goal for me: that the works I am creating are a direct translation of someone’s inner world. I think fashion is always an expression of our inner world, or it can be. But I think there are more steps to take towards achieving that.
Are you optimistic about the future of fashion?
IVH: It depends on the future of everything. It’s so hard to define where this is going. I am optimistic most of the time, but it can also be very difficult to see what’s happening in the world. Fashion is just one radar in a big machine; fashion is completely dependent on all other social changes that are happening. I don’t have a clear answer to your question, but ultimately, yes, there is always hope and positivity. There is so much progress being made, especially within fashion. There are so many companies worldwide that are focusing on sustainable materials, and I feel a lot of energy coming from that. There are a lot of efforts being made, which is amazing, but the pace of things is really going too slowly. I hope that more people will feel the urgency for change.
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