Couture represents the future of fashion.”
~~ Iris van Herpen
Seeing her presentation at Arab Fashion Council was absolutely amazing such a talented designer that brings a technique that not most of the designer does.
The Dutch Fashion designer Iris Van Herpen who is often hailed as one of the most innovative and esoteric designers of the 21stcentury.
Her work is often associated with its proximity to cutting-edge technologies – Van Herpen created haute couture expressing her laborious hand-made design in which she combines traditional craftsmanship and diligent handwork with innovative technology and unconventional materials such as synthetic boat rigging, processed leather sorts and the whalebones of children’s umbrellas to create visually stunning outfits.
Much of her couture is, for practical purposes, unwearable, and when describing it, journalists typically reach for the stars—to foreign planets, alien civilizations, the stuff of science fiction.
What she does is couture at its most essential: hand-made, unique, and free of shortcuts.
Although some people have the impression that she’s 3-D print whole collections, she would estimate that 80 percent of everything shemakes is by hand, and some of the dresses take more than six months of handwork. But both tools—a hand or a machine—can be usedin all levels of intricacy.
With her creations, Van Herpen has already carved out a rarefied niche for herself in the fashion world.
Many of Van Herpen’s designs are sculptural. Her dresses lie on the avant-garde side of couture, and while few of them are overtly “wearable,” they juxtapose her more ready-to-wear pieces.
Van Herpen has shown her work on runways and in museums, and now has her first major American show, titled Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion, at the High Museum in Atlanta, Ga.
She influenced several designers for example Noa Raviv an Israeli fashion designer that she use the same 3D print “Hard Copy” — a project that brings cutting-edge architectural and sculptural techniques to haute couture.
Indeed, Nabil El-Nayal (Syrian) is one of a growing number of bold and innovative young designers to explore 3D printing technologies in their designs along with Iris Van Herpen and TreeAsfour, Nayal is seeting the bar high for 3D printed fashion designs by seamlessly and stylishly merging the worlds of fashion and technology.
Iris Van Herpen -She’s describing her work in a simple word “movement”
“I want to give new meaning to couture—give it relevance in the age of technology. I see couture as the laboratory of the bigger pictureof fashion (the ready-to-wear), and my aim is to show that couture is not about yesterday. [That] it can be the place of innovation andcollaboration to help push production, materiality, and sustainability forward. [I hope to] make haute couture the engine of progress inour rapidly changing digital age.”
Her work is exactly the opposite of what generally fashion is today.
“I see couture as the source of refinement and new forms of craft.’’
Van Herpen is credited with being the first designer to create a 3-D–printed dress in 2010 (see the picture down bellow) for a fashion collection, and she’s on a mission to expand the scope and boundaries of couture by combining tradition and innovation; handwork and technology.
Fall 2019 Couture
