Iris Van Herpen’s Exhibition Is a Dazzling Couture Show

It’s doable that essentially the most dazzling couture present in Paris this week will not be really happening on a runway in any respect, however in a completely totally different type of setting. Doable that stated couture present will not be an invitation-only affair with gold ballroom chairs and the most recent movie star du jour, however relatively one open to the general public. And sure that it’s much less about nostalgia for a previous when couture was outlined by the whispering of silk satin ball robes, and extra a couple of dream of the long run.

The present in query? “Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” a one-woman exhibition that opened on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in late November and scheduled to run via April 28.

5 years within the making, “Sculpting the Senses” crystallizes why Ms. Van Herpen, 39, is the youngest feminine designer to be granted a solo present on the museum in its 140 years of existence. And why, greater than a decade after being invited to affix the ranks of Paris’s couturiers, Ms. Van Herpen has additionally been made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, an honor offered by the French Ministry of Tradition.

“She has managed to create a singular world, someplace between fairy story and science fiction,” stated Christine Macel, director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “In my view, she is exclusive and important.”

Although couture is usually known as trend’s “laboratory,” its place of “experimentation” — partly as a result of, as a made-to-order artwork, it may be as wildly inaccessible and costly because it must be — it additionally is usually handled as an anachronism. Seen as a relic of one other time, earlier than know-how; a part of a cultural legacy, certain, however with out a lot use past the purple carpet and fabulous Instagram content material.

Ms. Van Herpen’s work, which takes the entire thought of the “lab” at face worth (she is an everyday customer to CERN’s Massive Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and there three microscopes are included within the exhibition), is an authoritative rebuttal of this concept, made in material.

Or relatively in 3-D printing, tulle, Mylar, lace, silicon and organza.

Conceived as a journey via which the interrogation of creativity successfully mimics the explosion of life, the exhibition will not be a retrospective, however relatively an inquiry in 9 levels. One which begins with water and proceeds via earth, physique and ecosystems earlier than culminating in what the exhibition calls a “cosmic bloom.”

Scattered among the many 100 or so clothes and equipment on show — the kinds of otherworldly garments that flirt with the acquainted at the same time as they defy clarification (Is {that a} gown fabricated from … air bubbles? A splash frozen in air? The pores and skin of a praying mantis? A robe for a Martian coronation?) — are roughly 80 gadgets lent by artists, architects and establishments all over the world.

It’s not that the works are the inspiration for the garments. That will be an awfully trite interpretation. However relatively they exist in a dialogue with the clothes, taking the viewer inside Ms. Van Herpen’s omnivorous mind and situating trend within the continuum of summary approaches to understanding and deciphering the world.

“Generally folks understand trend as a bubble, which it’s, in a method,” Ms. Van Herpen stated, discussing how she and the curator Cloé Pitiot structured the present. “However I feel trend has such a giant reference to different layers of life; with psychology, philosophy, science, society. The extra you open your self to it, the extra you possibly can uncover inside it.”

To wit: a gown of iridescent watery abstraction that incorporates its personal in ebb and stream, displayed subsequent to delicate pen and ink illustrations of an octopus by the Nineteenth-century French naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur. And each are subsequent to a 2023 underwater video that Ms. Van Herpen made rather than a runway present with the free-diver, dancer and filmmaker Julie Gautier, wherein aquatic clothes swirl not simply up and down however throughout.

A curvy little mini gown that appears prefer it was pieced collectively from the wooden of an historical cathedral full with arches and flying buttresses (however which is definitely fabricated from copper-electroplated 3-D printed polyamide) stands close to a video projection from the 2015 biosystems documentary “Terra” by Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Michael Pitiot.

And a fragile bleached-white ray skeleton abuts a 2011 Van Herpen “skeleton” gown made in collaboration with Isaïe Bloch, a Belgian architect; a swimsuit of samurai armor mixes it up with a frock composed of metallic neck items circumnavigating the physique; and stills taken by the James Webb Area Telescope are the backdrop to a gown produced from lots of of golden organza petals, trying like a lionfish in air. To provide just a few examples.

The impact is to carry the viewer inside Ms. Van Herpen’s personal neural community, an awfully privileged place to be.

Together with two further rooms that floor the high-concept strategy within the enterprise of life — a “cupboard of curiosities” which options vitrines of beetles, an vintage copy of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and Ms. Van Herpen’s 3-D printed insectoid footwear; the “atelier,” the place material swatches are displayed like pointillist artwork on every wall together with doll-like mannequins that embody the design course of — it’s like a glimpse into the method of creation.

To deepen the expertise, every “stage” of the present consists of its personal sound set up composed by Salvador Breed, Ms. Van Herpen’s associate. The one frustration will not be with the ability to contact the clothes, which may look wearer-unfriendly however are sometimes a lot softer and extra pliable than they seem. As is evidenced by a wall that connects one ground of the 1,280-square-meter (13,780-square-foot) present to the subsequent, displaying a photographic collage of celebrities akin to Woman Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé sporting Ms. Van Herpen’s work whereas out on the earth. (The designer insists a lot of her items can go within the washer, although that’s exhausting to think about.)

Nonetheless, within the present’s subsequent incarnation Ms. Van Herpen is hoping to include contact. The exhibition has been so standard (with traces outdoors behind the velvet rope each day and the museum now staying open in a while Saturdays and Sundays to fulfill demand) that there are plans for it to journey to Brisbane, Australia; Singapore; Rotterdam, the Netherlands (Ms. Van Herpen is Dutch and based mostly in Amsterdam); and doubtlessly the US.

Within the remaining room, a curtain of acrylic lenses by the Japanese artist Haruka Kojin offers a photo voltaic system setting for a cluster of mannequins located not simply on the ground however hanging down from the ceiling, like stalactites, and jutting horizontally from the partitions of the room, successfully altering the viewer’s understanding of the very physics of fabric, since irrespective of the orientation, the garments themselves stay suspended in area. Regardless of what you may presume, there are not any secret wires or secret buildings concerned. Ms. Van Herpen has merely found out how you can give the clothes their very own gravity.

It’s a reminder that her genius has all the time been in understanding that know-how and couture are usually not oppositional forces — that, in some ways, the stitching needle was merely an early mechanical instrument — and that the one may be harnessed to comprehend the potential of the opposite. Given the present fears and conversations round A.I., it’s a palpably optimistic word on which to finish.