Iris van Herpen called her new collection Between the Lines; and true to form, she crafted, engineered, manipulated, and brought to life designs that defy comparison to anything else in fashion today. But in order to understand the between part, it helps to start with the lines themselves.
Several of the 16 creations were permutations of a process whereby hand-casted transparent polyurethane (PU) was hand-painted through injection molding. To get a sense of how much handwork must have been involved, the central décolletage area of the opening look features 32 of these stylized lines—which could just as easily be called gills, blades, or tildes for added flourish. Applied to ultra-sheer silk tulle, they had the impact of body markings or else a patterned second skin. This has been a leitmotif for the Dutch designer, whose use of spiral and tessellation arrangements contributes to the time-transcendent aspect of her work. But with this collection, she also applied the lines to a black silk gown making the reverse leap from museum-worthy to wearable. The jacket and coat boasting high-contrast white lines stood out, quite literally, for their curving sculpted projections that resembled airplane engines. But they, too, weren’t beyond the range of realistic, at least in relative terms. The black facets covering a jumpsuit reframed the body as a beautiful backdrop of negative space.
Where Van Herpen pushed to the far reaches of her outsized talent was the final “alchemy of light” dress with its suspended burst of transparent lenslike, faintly iridescent water drops. “This is completely about the way it moves with the body and how it plays on the eyes,” noted Van Herpen. At the risk of reducing the impact with wordplay, it made a major splash.
For all the technical details, the march of these pieces by models whose legs were propped up by diagonal copper heels gave the most complete sense of the designer’s vision. Within a darkened space accented by glitchy white perspective lines (by artist Esther Stocker), it seemed softer at times, and on the whole more feminine than previous collections. The thought that lingered post-show was not whether an actress might be bold enough to wear the “glitch” dress in laser-cut Mylar, but whether design like Van Herpen’s looks natural. Her long-time collaborator, architect Philip Beesley, weighed in: “They start as utterly artificial methodical acts . . . but in the intense fabrication cycling that we go through, literally hundreds of cycles of development, something very close to natural evolution can be seen.” Reading between the lines, in other words.
