Dress

Recognized for her inventive sourcing and manipulation of materials as well as for her interdisciplinary collaborations with artists, architects, scientists, and engineers, Iris van Herpen has provided an innovative model for fashion in the twenty-first century. This ensemble from her “Hybrid Holism” presentation was inspired by her frequent collaborator Philip Beesley’s responsive architectural installation Hylozoic Ground (2010). Van Herpen riffed on the theory of hylozoism—the notion that all matter contains life—to imagine a future in which garments have the potential to emulate nature and evolve in responsive ways. Although the shiny strips of PVC that form the flexible outer shell of this garment are entirely synthetic, they effortlessly echo the biomorphic shapes that characterize the rest of the collection.