Hypnosis is the name of Iris van Herpen's latest collection. The Dutch-born designer has worked in famous studios such as Alexander MacQueen, and founded her own brand in 2007 with a creative purpose of venting her ideas that could not have been realized using conventional sewing techniques. In this collection the fashion designer presents hypnotic garments made with avant-garde techniques that create multi-layered kinetic sculptures. She is always one step ahead.
The Dutch designer, known for her partnerships with architects and engineers to go abroad with her pieces, presented her latest collection, Hypnosis, on 1st July 2019 at the Élysée Montmartre in Paris during Haute Couture fashion week. For this collection she got inspired by American artist Anthony Howe's metal manifolds. The three-dimensional cyclic harmony of Howe’s sculptures is the main inspiration of this collection. Howe's “Omniverse” sculpture seeks to emphasize our cyclical relationship with nature with movements of expansion and contraction that express the universal life cycle.
“The Hypnosis collection is a hypnotic visualization of the tapestries of nature, the symbiotic cycles of our biosphere that intertwine air, land and oceans. It also reflects the ongoing dissection of the rhythms of life and resonates with the fragility within these intertwined worlds.” – Iris van Herpen
The whole collaboration with Howe emerges from an enthusiastic feeling of experiencing it through the merged elements of nature that are intrinsically related to each other. The grand finale of the Infinity collection is the dress, a maxi engineered skeleton embroidered with fragile pieces of feathers that with the movement of the walk create a cyclic flight around its own axis. It's a reflection of the grace and elaboration of our natural space, involving patterns and structures with its delicate landscape.
The magical effect is achieved thanks to the collaboration with Professor Phillip Beesley who developed the technique that involves tens of thousands of mini plotter-cuts ripples that continuously “break up” the dress in every movement of the body, showing some skin between these mysterious patterns. In order to achieve this effect, the printed duchesse-satin dress was plotter-cut into thousands of interconnected 0.8 mm thick waves designed to move faster than the eyes could capture. A real magic effect!
Hypnosis gives us the opportunity to experience an intertwining of fashion, nature and architecture in garments that look like sculptures and use advanced and detailed techniques to be performed in their excellence.
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