Fall 2025: Iris Van Herpen's ‘ SYMPOIESIS
This season, the Dutch couturier Iris Van Herpen turns to the expansive, life-giving force of the ocean as a conceptual gateway, bearing witness to its ecological transformation and transcribing it into cloth via translucently layered textures, liquidised forms, and silhouettes that surge and wane as the tide.
Influenced by James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, the collection explores how we are one with the ocean, the largest and most important ecosystem on our planet that generates more than half of the oxygen we breathe.
Seeking to convey not only the ocean’s state of peril but its innate beauty in the collection too, Van Herpen draws upon the freeform movement of American dancer Loie Fuller – famed for manipulated fabric in swirling, undulating patterns in her dances - to embody the full spectrum of the ocean’s forms, from its wild tidal power to its amorphous organisms .
The pioneering muse and dancer embraced the unpredictability of fabric in motion, shrouding herself in silk and using bamboo wands to expand the improvised phantasmal shapes she drew with her body. Van Herpen opened her show with a performance created in collaboration with light artist Nick Verstand that recalled Fuller’s moves using near-invisible Japanese airfabric
Always on the look out for cutting edge collaboration, the designer reached out to biodesigner Chris Bellamy and created a first-of-its-kind living look (ight) , inhabited by 125 million bioluminescent algae which emit light in response to movement.
Grown in sea-water baths over several months within a specialised nutrient gel, the Pyrocystis Lunula algae were moulded into an protective membrane then attentively cared for in conditions to mimic their natural marine home, with humidity, temperature, and circadian rhythm all tuned to their precise needs.
The chamber in which the living look is nurtured becomes, therefore, a microcosm of the ocean’s delicate balancing point. Caring for the garment, and for the 125 million Pyrocystis Lunula it contains, requires a symbiotic relationship and redefines the creation traditions entirely, as the garment is cultivated rather than constructed.
V
an Herpen’s prevailing dedication to exploring new textile technologies continues with the use of Brewed Protein - a novel fermented fibre by biotech company Spiber - which has been laser cut and heat bonded to sheer organza.
The designer also created a new kinetic look with artist Casey Curran with an undulating golden coil-vein armature allowing delicate wings to flutter gently in a wave-like rhythm, their silhouette inspired by a microscopic view of the structure of bioluminescent algae.
