How Iris van Herpen, designer to the likes of Björk, Beyoncé and Tilda Swinton, likes to play at the intersection of art and fashion
She admires the late Azzedine Alaïa for showing his designs at his own home – and perhaps aspires to do the same at her new home outside Amsterdam, where she lives with sound designer Salvador Breed
Iris van Herpen has always resisted being categorised. Since opening her Amsterdam-based atelier in 2007, the Dutch haute couturier has worked across the worlds of science, technology, art and architecture. She has created and 3D printed her own materials and collaborated with physicists, marine biologists and architects, so you can be sure that van Herpen believes art and fashion exist in the same plane.
Now it seems the world is catching up. In 2023, an expansive survey of her work, “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses”, was one of the most visited exhibitions at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In June the exhibition opened in the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia.
For van Herpen, one of the great pleasures of showing her work in this way has been the ways people have interacted with it. Mostly, she says, taking the time to understand its complexities: some stayed for hours, some drew what they saw.
“I really learned that people understand the work so much better by really having time to look at it,” says van Herpen, who was in Brisbane to open the Australian iteration of the exhibition.
This meditation on time was also felt in her June haute couture show. Called Hybrid Show, it represented van Herpen’s first foray into “pure” artistic practice with four large-scale “aerial sculptures” created from tulle. Alongside these centrepieces were models such as Coco Rocha wearing her mesmerising couture creations and interacting with the show’s attendees while fixed in plaster to the wall as if in an art gallery.
The show was inspired by van Herpen’s experience of viewers’ reactions to her “Sculpting the Senses” exhibition. “But at the same time, of course, what is not possible in the exhibition is to have a person in it – a living person who brings life to the pieces. And that was possible in Paris. [The show] was about an hour, so it was sort of in between the setting of a runway and the setting of an exhibition.”
For van Herpen, this was a major shift in the way she works.
“It’s been really liberating to work at a larger scale … I think there’s a difference between art and design in that sense, where with an artwork, it’s really about capturing an emotion and transferring that to the audience. Whereas in design, beauty is a bigger element because ultimately it’s worn on the body, and the movement is always in my mind, but also the proportions – that it becomes feminine,” adds the 40-year-old.
Splitting her time between collaborating with the couture atelier and the solo practice of her sculptures has redefined her work too.