3-D Printing Takes to the Runway

January 17, 2016

High Museum of Art “Iris van Herpen” (2015)

Iris van Herpen (first name pronounced ear-us) is an outrageous young fashion designer from Antwerp. You are far more likely to see a dress by her in a movie than on the street, but either way it would be a memorable sight. Though she broke out on the scene just a few years back, in 2007—you can now read about Ms. van Herpen almost anywhere—how often has such an artiste been tagged with the label “fashion designer/sculptor”?

It is a stunning experience to witness, in person, her futuristic creations. Connie and I recently beheld such—a selection of about thirty of her kunstwerks at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The “dresses,” if you want to call them that, are made of almost anything but whole cloth—plastics, glass, metal-resin compounds—that are, however, by the magic of design and technology, transformed—visually and tactilely (yes, that is an adverb) and strikingly—into the kinetic properties of fabrics. Which, one must add, still have the look (kind of) and feel (sort-of) of . . . well, clothes.

Materials are indeed transforming the world, and van Herpen has availed herself of a number of technical innovations. This, from the museum’s website:

van Herpen is known for her willingness to experiment—exploring new fabrics created by blending steel with silk or iron filings with resin, incorporating unexpected materials ranging from umbrella tines to magnets, and pushing the boundaries of technologies such as 3-D printing.

Of late, thanks to the museums that have been collecting her works, we, as well as the wealthy (oh, and it must be said, she has a “line” of “affordable” knockoff-outfits as well)—we too get to share in the discoveries and are we have come to take it all in. There are a lot of normal folks here, I observe, like me, wild-eyed. In a sense, I am thinking as I traverse the show, that this experience may have have been like to see other break-out phenoms, like maybe Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali. In a side room we are treated to a continuous video of her many fashion shows, dramatically lighted and well-captured. At one of the shows on the reel, the fashion models put the finish to their robotic stroll by ensconcing themselves in huge polyethylene envelopes, as if caught in great webs of transparent stasis.

Cartoonish? A bit. And yet, for all the outrageous if arty stunts at the shows, I would not be writing you this morning had I not been entranced by the creations themselves and their very whimsy. Looking at them in a dramatically-lighted museum environment gives you over to a part of the psyche that longs for breaking out of the doldrums . . . . And for that brief hour our lives were wrapped—as if in polyethylene—in the dreamscape of another world. We view the dresses, yes—we read of their substance and their inspiration, yes—but for a split second I am actually feeling in the presence of Iris van Herpen herself—as if I were in the movie “Ex Machina” alongside the main character, Artificial Intelligence-creator Nathan (Oscar Issac)—and asking: “Having now created this beautiful monster, which suddenly has a life of it’s own, what’s next?”

Well, “Ex Machina” famously does not answer that question, and neither does van Herpen. As usual I come to the end of my Sunday morning writing ritual, having run out of adjectives. How about one of these: OtherWorldish – NetherWorldish – Netherlandish?

Van Herpen: Fearless and Approachable