Fall 2020 Couture Collection: Iris van Herpen

Iris van Herpen’s Couture Collection is not really a collection, in the sense that it is not made of several dresses. The designer has in fact created, for the first time in her career – and probably also for the first time in the history of Haute Couture – a collection consisting of only one dress, entitled Transmotion. Transmotion is also the title of the short movie with which the dress had been presented to the public. The protagonist is the model Carice van Houten, filmed at her home by the director Ryan McDaniels.

Van Herpen clarifies that the intent of this dress and its presentation is continuating of her main research, which is the investigation for new ways of communicating with natural landscape that surrounds us, a true source of inspiration and endless reservoir of beauties, so elaborated that they can be simply defined as miracles. Transmotion is a term that recalls the fluidity of van Herpen’s work, whose fabrics and shapes often recall the idea of movement. On the other hand, it also reflects the current historical moment, when change is necessary and inevitable. The white organza dress therefore invites us to start this new chapter in a light way, welcoming the change and letting it shape us and take us where we are fated to go.

The final feeling that short film creates in viewers is based on contrast. The gentle pleating is decorated with small black swarovski, moved by sort of electromagnetic bands. The black polyester decoration of bust extends outwards, with laser-cut applications that refer to the articulated structures of tropical flowers. Futuristic technology perfectly follows nature and its creative process. The glass walls of environment in which the shots were taken, however, seem to suggest an idea of caging. As if there were an impalpable border between us and the green forest outside, an impediment that locks us in our own reality and of which we are the only architects.

Cover image credits: vogue.com