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Sculpting the Senses
The Style Files

Sculpting the Senses

In Dutch couturier Iris van Herpen's monumental retrospective in Paris, "you are walking through my soul and my brain.”

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Dana Thomas
Dec 11, 2023
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Sculpting the Senses
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Rare is the major fashion retrospective dedicated to a living designer.

Rarer still is one celebrating a creator who’s been in business less than 20 years.

But 39-year-old Dutch couturier Iris van Herpen isn’t an architypical star designer, nor does she make the sort of clothes you see usually see in museums—or on the street, for that matter. Indeed, van Herpen’s designs are organic, ethereal—cosmic, even.

Cosmica Dress, in collaboration with Kim Keever (print), 2019. Photo by Warren du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones.

Since van Herpen launched her namesake brand in Amsterdam in 2007, she has “been disrupting the codes of fashion and opening doors to universes seemingly unrelated to her discipline,” states Cloé Pitiot, curator of “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” a monumental and wildly futuristic exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris through April 28, 2024.

The 100 couture pieces on display, often conceived and produced in collaboration with artists and scientists, and executed with modern technology, like laser cutting and 3-D printing, are “forays into uncharted territories,” Pitiot writes in the show’s catalogue, and they offer “unparalleled perspectives” not only on fashion, but life.

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