The Culture of Beauty
Die Alchemistin
Big catwalk for the Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen. Mademoiselle Lili is looking forward to one of the most exciting fashion exhibitions of the season.
She makes shirt collars out of water or dresses out of electricity and has been the experimental magician at the Paris haute couture shows since 2011: Many years ago I had the impressive opportunity to look into Iris van Herpen's creative cauldron in Amsterdam. At that time she was working on a collection that focused on the phenomenon of magnetism and human skin. I watched as the spines of the moon dress stood up like stalagmites under a strong magnet, a kind of wearable sculpture made of liquid plastic mixed with metal powder. How scar or piercing dresses were cast layer by layer from skin-colored silicone.
On the walls hung hundreds of bones impaled with needles, drawings of skeletons and spines, deceptively real silicone skin flaps with scars and piercing jewelry, and textiles finely cut like butterfly wings with a laser cutter. The sun-drenched loft studio in the old Amsterdam harbor looked like an obscure secret laboratory from Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs”.
Their creations are permanent extensions of the boundaries of what is possible. Whether she lets drops of water coagulate into transparent collars or electrifies models and makes lightning wearable, whether she conjures up new shapes modeled on microbacteria from 3D printers or designs an entire galaxy of stars as a dress like for the album cover “Biophilia” the singer Björk, whom she admires: Iris van Herpen pushes the boundaries of what fashion means, both technically and aesthetically. The question of whether this is art is obsolete.
Now the Musée des Arts décoratifs is honoring the Dutch fashion designer, one of the most avant-garde personalities of her generation. The retrospective, which combines fashion, contemporary art, design and science, is a sensual journey of discovery into the designer's universe, where technology and traditional haute couture craftsmanship merge.
The exhibition aims to approach her work from multiple perspectives: around 100 of her fashion designs enter into dialogue with a selection of contemporary works of art, installations, videos, photographs and objects from the natural sciences - for an immersive overall experience of light, space and music.
Incidentally, Van Herpen's aesthetic, which often seems as if the cult films "Alien" and "Naked Lunch" were meeting for brunch, is not a nod to screen art. “I grew up without TV or movies,” she told me. It was only later that she began to close the gaps in her cinematographic knowledge - thanks to the DVD collection of her life partner, the sound designer Salvador Breed, who creates the music for all of her fashion shows and who also provides the soundtrack for this exhibition.
„Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses.“ Vom 29. November 2023 bis zum 28. April 2024, www.madparis.fr