Iris Van Herpen Paris Fashion Week: Dutch designer debuts living dress

Sydney Morning Herald

11-07-2025

When it was not being worn, the dress was returned to its natural habitat – though even in the unnatural environment of a fashion show, the algae held their own (colour). Still, how long they will ultimately live, and what will happen to the outfit once they expire, is not exactly clear.
'No one knows!' van Herpen chortled. 'That's the beauty of it. It's very much like a human being in that sense. It needs eight hours of sleep, it needs sunlight, it needs not too much stress.'
Who can't relate?
The point of the living dress, van Herpen says, as with the rest of her collection, was to force a rethink of our relationship with the ocean – a theme that has been part of her work since 2017, when she immersed musicians in tanks of water for a show.
To that end, this season's show opened with a performance involving lasers that danced across a gown made of what the show notes called Japanese 'air fabric.' One look that resembled a translucent ivory Slinky trailing around the body was made of Brewed Protein, a fibre from fermented plant-based materials by the Japanese biotech company Spiber; another was formed from resin-coated silk, which resembled a wave caught in mid-froth.
As much as anything, however, her work, and especially the living dress, actually prompts a rethinking of our relationship with our wardrobes, and the way clothes need care in order to last. Not to mention a rethinking of the essence of couture.
The Schiaparelli show included a reverse cleavage dress with a beating ruby heart.
As the laboratory of fashion, couture is defined by experimentation and the sort of pie-in-the-sky imagination that is only possible when price and time have no limit.
That's how you got a ruby crystal heart necklace that actually throbbed worn over a backward dress at Schiaparelli, the gown's torso – complete with breast plate – layered over the spine.
It's how the team at Chanel, creating its final collection before the first show of new designer Matthieu Blazy, dreamed up the shaggy bouclé 'skins' that resembled bison pelts but were actually made from tulle and feathers, worn over the shoulders of their barbarian bourgeoisie (the best things in an otherwise lacklustre show).
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Too often, however, couture seems as if it is preserving the know-how of the past – its embroideries, brocades and fairy tales – rather than trying to invent what's next. Van Herpen's work challenged all of that, simply by asking: What if a garment was not only constructed, but cultivated?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
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