It’s difficult to imagine a more aptly named setting for Iris van Herpen’s Fall 2013 Couture show than the Palais de la Découverte (Palace of Discovery). This Dutch designer is continually pushing the boundaries of what technology and collaboration makes possible in fashion. Each season the complexity of what she does seems to expand, as does her list of coconspirators. Among the new names on the roster for her Wilderness Embodied collection was that of Cedric Laquieze. A taxidermist and artist, he created bird head sculptures of silicone-coated gull skulls with pearl and glass eyes that perched on the shoulders of a blush-colored Bird dress made of laser-cut silicone. Another addition to the team was the multidisciplinary creator Jólan van der Wiel, with whom Van Herpen designed a Magnetic Moon dress by creating an iron and plastic mixture shaped with magnets.
Less dramatic perhaps, but generating a fair amount of press as it represented a “first,” was the Hybrid Dress. Made using the 3-D printing process, it was “overmolded by hand with silicone.” The importance of this was that is showed how prototyping can work hand in hand with more traditional techniques. While the bone-like details on this dress were skeletal/animal, the models’ cage-like shoes resembled “a tangle of roots” and referenced the plant world. Van Herpen was successful in balancing the savagery and beauty of nature in Wilderness Embodied, and, importantly, she continued to erode stereotypes about the cold sterility of technology. As architect Philip Beesley, the designer’s frequent collaborator, told The Globe and Mail: “I think people respond intuitively to these ideas with a mixture of fascination and disorientation; there’s a warmth to wildness.”
