Iris van Herpen. Couture Fall 2019 - Paris

(Images from the designer and the public domain. Credited to the photographer/company where applicable: WWD and Go Runway)

I have been reviewing Iris van Herpen couture shows since 2013, she is probably the most recognized of the couture designers who uses 3D printing to create her patented template of styles.  I recall at the time there was, very slightly, a fear in relation to 3D printing, that the accessibility of being able to print your own clothes could bypass traditional sourcing of weaves and pattern making.  Those fears were overblown, as 3D printing stayed within the exclusive due to the high overhead costs and technology in producing the clothing, traditional ways of producing clothes remained, with 3D printing today rarely seen as a creative disruptive industry that would overthrow traditional fashion techniques.  For van Herpen, who has stayed the course and defined her own unique 3D printing styles, this is has been a windfall for her creative mastery. 

Van Herpen has benchmarked her own technological inspired styles, by layering gradient dyed silks into sculptured molds, which are then finely shaped with a 3D laser cut of PETG (Polyethylene terephthalate) a polymer resin.  Pieces are then weaved together by hand, a stratum of free flowing gradations, set in a very technically stylized form.  With techniques and materials that are beyond what her contemporaries are utilizing at this point in time, so van Herpen's niche is very much, in someways ironically, matched completely to haute couture presentations.  

For her couture Fall 2019 collection, van Herpen has paired with sculptor Andrew Howe who builds kinetic wind sculptures, to which he titled the collaborative installation “Omniverse” a slow moving circular sculpture, created, in a symbolic way that models cosmological moments, as models walked though its opening – as a represented flow of nature, the continuum of motion.  

Digitally inspired color patterns, rich and beautifully layered, the details are so impressive.  Which is what couture is all about, the fine details, the intricate work and building into a complexity of aesthetics.  With layered waves of colored prints, shaped and contoured into a silhouette array.  In tune with nature, yet at the same time remolding and reconfiguring nature, a uniqueness of the human perceptive to make what we see and feel from the natural world more so.