Iris Van Herpen Fall 2024 Couture: To Wear, or to Hang? That Is the Question

Many of Iris Van Herpen’s couture clients also collect art, and some even display her otherworldly, intricate dresses in their homes like works of art, including a Brazilian tax lawyer who recently got married in what may have been the world’s first 3D-printed bridal gown.

They’ll be spoiled for choice this season as the Dutch designer created five dresses and four large-scale artworks for the fall 2024 season, displaying all of them on the walls of a large gallery-like space.

Visitors to her presentation — surely one of the wackiest of the week — could gaze up at white tulle panels streaked with dense embroideries and thick paint — imagine futuristic relief maps — or at live models writhing against white canvases, their feet anchored to white pumps jutting out from the bottoms of the panels.

Alas, Coco Rocha couldn’t kick up her heels, so she emoted with her arms, which swayed like seaweed in a strong current as she worked her golden gown with its whorled fabric jutting from one hip and one sleeve. The stunner, with a high-thigh slit, could be Van Herpen’s strongest contender yet for the next awards season. (Are you reading this, Law Roach?)

The other four dresses were built on tulle, like Van Herpen’s “aerial sculptures” — her term for her large, transparent panels stretched between steel tubing. To this delicate material, the designer embroidered zillions of pearls in cyclone-like formations or delicate lace, also adding dramatic sleeves, a tumble of tubular ruffles, or a frothy train, here tacked to the canvas.

She used a heat gun to sculpt one of her transparent gowns with a glistening bodice and tentacles of sheer fabric that connect the hips and the wrists.

“I really needed to bring the two worlds of art and fashion even closer together,” Van Herpen explained as visitors trained their smartphones on the live-action panels. “The interdisciplinary approach that I have is ongoing, but I really wanted to push it a step further.”

Van Herpen’s recent exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which mingled about 100 haute couture creations with fossils, avant-garde artworks and scientific instruments, stretched public perceptions of her work, putting it in a broader context of the natural world, science and human possibility. Her couture week exercise was showing sculptural forms on and off the body.

The designer said she’s popping off to Brisbane, Australia, in the coming days as her “Sculpting the Senses” exhibition moves to the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. The hit show, which welcomed some 400,000 visitors in Paris, will also make stops in Singapore, the Netherlands and the U.S., she said, keeping mum on details about the last destination. An art museum, perhaps?

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