The Eye of the Storm

Iris van Herpen at the Kunsthal

Article

No. 39 • September 2025

Iris van Herpen’s creations are not merely garments – they are portals to another reality, where the organic meets the futuristic and the impossible becomes tangible. This Autumn, her visionary designs are on view at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam.

text: Lidewij Edelkoort

Fig 1. One of the designs from Sympoiesis, Iris van Herpen’s latest collection, presented during Paris Haute Couture week, July 2025 © Rob Rusling

Her parents made the perfect choice: the girl truly inhabits her given name. She is as magical and mysterious as the colour and texture of her eye – of our eyes – the iris. As the peripheral element that structures and contains the pupil like a sphincter, the iris filters light like a cell. It is slightly ruffled at the edges like a textile, able to fold like paper, iridescent like a laser, concentrated like a lens, engineered like a futuristic material.

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, our eyes should recognise the intriguing similarity between the outlandish creations of Iris van Herpen and the inner workings of the iris – enhancing and dilating colour and structure through optical illusions. She moulds, folds, and projects form, borrowing from the organic to create the futuristic, and at times, the absurdist. Her creativity employs optical effects that shift with movement, blurring the boundary between humans and their clothing.

The muscles of the iris adjust the pupil based on changes in light – an automated movement that is reflected in her collection Hypnosis, where garments seem to dilate and contract with every motion of the body, each source of light illuminating the collision of dream and reality. These movements of expansion and contraction perfectly encapsulate the core of her couture, where, on one hand, she seeks to control processes, while on the other, she invites technology to interfere and transform.

She draws inspiration from art for pattern, architecture for volume, and music for sound waves – but her greatest inspiration is nature and its smallest resilient particles. Her biomorphic creations not only imagine the future but also reflect our origins, the beginnings of life.

Lidewij Edelkoort

‘Her designs forecast the aura of a new day, where skin and matter merge into one – transforming women into birds, angels, and demons’

Her vision for the future is enigmatic. Her inspirations lie within the bombastic and the biological, forming a hallucinatory hybrid of cutting-edge couture. She proposes restraining, corseted dresses that allow wearers to feel contained yet transcend themselves. She continues to employ the latest technologies to create coverings and engineer elegance, such as her most recent gown made from glow-in-the-dark algae material. At the frontier of the future, she understands the power of crafted intelligence versus artificial intelligence. Her designs forecast the aura of a new day, where skin and matter merge into one – transforming women into birds, angels, and demons, restricted and liberated simultaneously. A bewitching aesthetic that transcends fashion.

Fig 2. Designs from Sympoiesis, Iris van Herpen’s latest collection, presented during Paris Haute Couture week, July 2025 © Rob Rusling

The transcendental vision of her garments has been present since her first Parisian fashion show, earning her both recognition and acclaim. Yet it was Queen Máxima of the Netherlands who brought one of her dresses vividly to life while opening an exhibition in Paris. Never before has someone embodied her creation so accessibly, stepping out of a car with effortless glamour, making the world of Van Herpen tangible – and showing us that the future is now.

The exhibition Sculpting the Senses was first curated and organised by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2023 and drew a record-breaking 370,000 visitors. The Kunsthal in Rotterdam is the next stage of this awe-inspiring exhibition, uniting art, fashion, nature, and technology.

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is on view from 27 September until 1 March 2026 at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. Read more about the exhibition here