The fashion world is abuzz with excitement about Dutch designer Iris van Herpen’s latest Hybrid Show, unveiled at Paris Haute Couture Week 2024. “This is the natural next step for me to really show what I mean,” van Herpen remarked, and her groundbreaking presentation did not disappoint. The show featured her debut of four aerial sculptures, marking a new chapter in visual artistry for the designer.
Iris van Herpen’s Hybrid Show
Van Herpen’s innovation extended beyond her couture designs; she introduced real sculptures showcasing her creations suspended in the air, capturing the attention of fashion enthusiasts and marking her entry into the art space. The surreal showcase was further enhanced by five life-size ‘sculptures’ displaying her Haute Couture gowns. Remarkably, five models, seemingly fixed to canvases, presented these creations.
Iris van Herpen’s Hybrid Show
Among the featured gowns, one was adorned with pearls on a transparent, filigreed structure, molded with a heat gun into glass-infused organza. Another gown showcased an ethereal lace pattern fused with floaty silk, reimagining a kimono into a bronzed dress with intricate pleats and folds.
Iris van Herpen’s Hybrid Show
The meticulously planned show, which spanned a year and lasted 45 minutes, was a culmination of van Herpen’s long-held dream. “This show really is a hybrid performance. There are living performers doing the installation, and it will be physically intense,” she explained.
Iris van Herpen’s Hybrid Show
The collection, titled Ancient Ancestors, extends van Herpen’s homage to nature, drawing inspiration from the sea. This response to recent research by French biochemist Emmanuel Farge and his team at the Institut Curie highlights how early marine organisms developed sensory abilities by detecting ocean movement. “Western thinking has long been dominated by an anthropocentric perspective, a worldview that positions humans as separate from and superior to nature. This paradigm has led to significant environmental degradation and biodiversity loss,” van Herpen says. Her artworks celebrate nature’s power, urging audiences to reconsider their relationship with the planet and embrace collective change.“For a long time, I’ve been working on expanding people’s perception of how fashion and art can be symbiotic. This is the natural next step for me to really show what I mean,” she said, likening her moulage technique to sculpting. “Even though we call one practice ‘Haute Couture’ and the other ‘art,’ to me, it’s one universe.”
Iris van Herpen’s Hybrid Show
The year-long project not only celebrates van Herpen’s reconnection with nature but also reflects the freedom she has gained from slowing down. Unfolding Time features curvaceous, hand-pleated silk forms that evoke van Herpen’s sensation of time stretching outdoors. The two largest sculptures—Weightlessness of the Unknown and Embers of the Mind—embody how van Herpen sees the creative process as paralleling nature’s rhythms. Describing the works as “self-portraits of her inner world,” she materializes the beauty and chaos of ideation and experimentation through abstract depictions of renewal and destruction. “The works are about catharsis,” van Herpen notes, finding the handwork meditative. “It’s in that stage of surrendering to the craftsmanship, being free from time, where I can let go of a certain physical reality that is constraining me and a sense of transcendence is materialized.”