A dance of materials: between the organic and inorganic in Iris van Herpen’s fashion

A frozen fall
Watching a model walk in the Frozen fall dress and headpiece by Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen is a breathtaking experience (look 12 from the collection Syntopia, A/W 2018–19).¹ See look 12 from the Syntopia collection on Iris van Herpen’s website: https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/syntopia/runway-7#img-7917, accessed May 5, 2024. The dress dances around the body while the face is covered in shimmering shades of pale blue. As always, movement – the dance of materials – is so important for the spectacular designs of van Herpen, herself a trained dancer. In this case she captures the overlapping of feathers together with the movement of bird wings in flight – ephemeral and quivering. Yet this wavering phenomenon of nature is designed as a material dress that is laser-cut from mylar and white cotton heat-bonded to hundreds of layers of two-toned dyed blue organza. As van Herpen recounts on her website:

As a former dancer, the transformation within movement has hypnotized me. For this collection I looked closely at the minutiae of bird flight and the intricate echoing forms within avian motion. The artists Studio Drift and the scientist Etienne Jules Marey inspired me to look more closely at the draping of a garment through chronophotography. By slowing down time into split seconds I started breaking down the usual draping of fabric, to then layer the milliseconds all slightly shifted, like the layering of a bird’s feather.² ‘Syntopia – About’, Iris van Herpen, https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/syntopia/syntopia-photography-by-molly-sj-lowe, accessed 5 May 2024.

Pleating and laser cutting, the result of van Herpen’s design process of digitally designed weaving, creates thousands of transparent folds ‘that drape like time-lapse motion’.³ ibid. The image of the dress shows the lines of those folds waving between the now (the ‘fall’) and time immemorial (the ‘frozen’). The Frozen fall dress and headpiece signpost a continuum between nature and the machine, or between the human and the nonhuman, the material and the immaterial. The dress may be inspired by nature – the fluttering movement of bird wings – but its folds are highly technologically mediated in the making of its fabric and in the artificial shapes that it approximates.

If any fashion designer systematically addresses the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘the machine’, it is Iris van Herpen. Her Syntopia collection, as in so many (if not all) of her collections, acknowledges the convergence of biology with technology, or nature and the machine. Known for her synthesis of high technology and the artisanal craftsmanship of couture, van Herpen merges the artificial with the organic, inspired by spider webs, coral reefs, the rhizomic roots of fungi, undulating waves of water or smoke, marine organisms, and the dendrites and synapses of neural networks. Building on earlier work, in this essay I will first argue that van Herpen’s highly technological designs can be considered ‘posthuman’ fashion, as they feature the intertwining relationship between the organic and the inorganic.⁴See Anneke Smelik, ‘A posthuman turn in fashion’, in Veronica Manlow, Eugenia Paulicelli & Elizabeth Wissinger (eds), The Routledge Companion to Fashion Studies, Routledge, New York, pp. 57–64; Anneke Smelik, ‘Fractal folds: the posthuman fashion of Iris van Herpen’, Fashion Theory, vol. 26, no. 1, 2022, pp. 5–26. I will then read these fashion designs through the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as a ‘body without organs’ and trace how a process of becoming is triggered and enacted.

Posthuman hybridity
By merging fashion with art, science, technology and the natural environment, van Herpen produces a posthuman style of in-betweenness, of hybridity. I call her designs ‘posthuman’ because she creates encounters between craftsmanship and technology, the organic and inorganic, and between materiality and immateriality.⁵See Smelik, ‘A posthuman turn in fashion’. These encounters generate both practical and aesthetic effects that amount to more than the sum of their parts. Van Herpen’s designs self-organise and evolve dynamically, precisely because they are not unitary entities but instead heterogeneous assemblages of hybrid components.

The posthuman is basically a hybrid figure; it is about thinking what the human is or, rather, becomes, living in a world that is both biological and technological. The main idea of posthuman philosophy is that the human is decentred in a time of unprecedented technological development and the dual crises of climate change and all-pervading capitalism.⁶ See Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Feminism, Polity, Cambridge, 2021. A posthuman perspective acknowledges a nature–culture continuum, such as between the human and its many others – the nonhuman. It also challenges any suggestion of a hierarchical relation between the human and the nonhuman.⁷ See Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Polity, Cambridge, 2013. Instead, posthumanism proposes a non-anthropocentric view by taking the human subject away from the centre of attention. It permits an understanding of fashion as materially co-produced in a complex network of interconnected human and nonhuman actors.⁸ See Anneke Smelik, ‘New materialism: a theoretical framework for fashion in the age of technological innovation’, International Journal of Fashion Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 31–52. As such, the term ‘posthuman’ recognises the human as being always already interconnected with the wider material world.

The nonhuman can be organic or inorganic: nature or the machine. Traditionally, the nonhuman refers to the organic world of nature: to trees, animals or monsters, as well as to bacteria, fungi or spiders. Today, the nonhuman equally pertains to the technological or inorganic world of machines, robotics and artificial intelligence. In the case of fashion, the nonhuman can be made of organic materials like wool, silk and cotton, or of technological materials like polymer fibres, solar cells or 3D-printed polyamide. In the case of van Herpen’s designs, we usually find a mix of natural fibres like wool, silk and cotton and synthetic ones like mylar, polyurethane and silicone.

I still remember the first time I saw van Herpen’s designs. I visited the Arnhem Fashion Biennale in 2011, where I cast my eyes upon van Herpen’s white 3D-printed top for her 2010 collection Crystallisation. This very first 3D-printed piece, with its otherworldly design, made van Herpen famous and now features as the cover image for the catalogue of the exhibition Sculpting the Senses.⁹ The Iris van Herpen retrospective Sculpting the Senses ran at Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris from 29 November 2023 until 28 April 2024. It will travel to the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane and on to Singapore in 2025 and Rotterdam in 2025–26. See the exhibition catalogue, Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Lannoo, Amsterdam, 2023. A year later the design was launched again as look 16 in van Herpen’s first haute couture collection presented in Paris, Capriole, A/W 2011.¹⁰ Unfortunately, van Herpen’s website no longer features all collections in its archive and has merged the earlier collections of 2010 and 2011. While this top was the last (unnumbered) look in 2010, and look 11 in 2011, on the website it is now look 16 in the collection Capriole, which brings together designs from several years. See ‘Capriole’, Iris van Herpen, https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/capriole/runway-17, accessed 5 May 2024 I remember a sense of awe at the sheer brilliance of this strange form mimicking coral, shell, crystal, a snail or a fossil. The organic forms are clearly inspired by nature, yet the technology of 3D-printing was at the time entirely new. For this she worked with architect Daniel Widrig, and van Herpen continues to collaborate with architects, artists and scientists. Rapid prototyping enabled van Herpen to materialise digital designs with a 3D printer, producing elaborate folds without the need for needle and thread. The intricacy of the three-dimensional folds that the then new technology of 3D printing allowed was quite unique; however, these early designs are made of rather hard and uncomfortable materials like polyamide. Neither I nor anyone else but a fashion model could or would wear this design, but its novelty was – and still is – exciting. As early as in 2010, van Herpen introduced her innovative style, always moving back and forth between sartorial craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology, designing in between the organic and inorganic.

This is not the only design that finds its inspiration in a natural phenomenon. In many of her designs van Herpen uses pioneering technologies to represent immaterial processes like dreams, soundwaves, wisps of smoke, magnetic fields or splashes of water. She admires complex organic forms like spider webs, butterfly wings, shells and skeletons. In an interview she explains why: ‘With 3D printing, I am very much drawn to the organic … because in organic structures such as fossils, for instance, you have structures that you can’t easily replicate by hand.’¹¹Iris van Herpen, quoted in Andrew Bolton, Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2016, p. xvii (in the supplement to the catalogue). The technique of digital designing allows her to create in three dimensions sophisticated forms that are impossible to design using a 2D drawing or even by moulding on a dummy.

Another example of collapsing the boundary between nature and technology is the collection Magnetic Motion, S/S 2015.¹²Unfortunately, the archive on van Herpen’s website has no record of the collections of 2014 and 2015. I gathered information from several websites, including ‘Magnetic Motion – Iris van Herpen’, Ars Electronica, 2016, https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/magnetic-motion/; and Dan Howarth, ‘Iris van Herpen uses 3D printing and magnets to form spring–summer 2015 fashion collection’, Dezeen, 1 Oct. 2014, accessed 5 May 2024. https://www.dezeen.com/2014/10/01/iris-van-herpen-magnetic-motion-spring-summer-2015-fashion-collection-3d-printing-magnets/ accessed 5 May 2024. For this collection van Herpen worked with Dutch artist Jólan van der Wiel on a series of accessories, including shoes, belts, necklaces and clutches. For the dresses she collaborated with Canadian architect Philip Beesley, whose work combines advanced computing, synthetic biology and mechatronics engineering. To create the intricate three-dimensional structures for this collection, she not only used 3D printing, injection moulding and laser cutting, but also the power of magnets. The structural forms were made from harder plastic materials contrasted with fine lace and protruding ‘feathers’ made from cellulose triacetate. Van Herpen was inspired by a visit to the Swiss scientific research facility CERN, where she witnessed the Large Hadron Collider create magnetic fields 20,000 times greater than is possible on Earth. She worked with magnetic force to shape the shoes for this collection, manipulating metal-infused materials with strong magnets, making the filings move outwards and transform into a chaos of punky spikes and spooky shards.¹³ See NGV Collection Online, ‘Shoes, Iris van Herpen, 2015’, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/131311/, accessed 5 May, 2024.

In my view, Magnetic Motion is the most mechanical and cold look that van Herpen has designed. So far, I have argued that hybridity is key to the figure of the posthuman because of the interconnections between the organic and the technological.¹⁴ See Smelik, ‘A posthuman turn in fashion’. Van Herpen’s collections merge the human, female body with animals, trees or plants (Wilderness Embodied, A/W 2013; Biopiracy, A/W 2014), wisps of smoke (Refinery Smoke, S/S 2009), sound waves (Seijaku, A/W 2016), dendrites and synapses (Sensory Seas, S/S 2020; Architectonics, A/W 2023/24), and much more. It is the hybridity that adds a self-organising energy to the designs. Nature is capable of dynamic self-organisation, but van Herpen shows that technology is too. Not only does nature live, but technology is also smart and alive. Featuring a posthuman style of dynamic in-betweenness – the human and the nonhuman – she helps to dress a posthuman body that is organically traversed by technology and new materials. The contrast of producing organic structures with the latest technologies creates a posthuman aesthetic – an aesthetic that is post-naturalistic, enacting a nature–culture continuum.

A body without organs
Bridging the digital and the physical, van Herpen’s designs present female bodies as posthuman figures in a nature–culture continuum. She shows how the human is deeply entangled with the wider material world, both organically and technologically. By making alliances with the nonhuman, she denaturalises the human body, yet presents the technology as a new protective frame. Inventing a posthuman aesthetic means to ‘do’ something to the human body (and in the case of van Herpen this is primarily an idealised female body). This can, for example, be seen in an early design from the Capriole collection, the ‘skeleton’ dress (look 1, A/W 2011), a white polyamide 3D-printed design made in collaboration with architect Isaïe Bloch. The exoskeleton is quite a haunting design; it is as if the body has been turned inside out by wearing the bones in front of the body. The skeletal element is a form to which van Herpen returns time and again in her designs, and can be seen, for example, in the Ananda-Maya dress from the collection Meta Morphism, (A/W 2022), which I discuss later in this article.

As in many of her other designs, van Herpen manages to denaturalise the human body and make it weird: inside-out, with lumps and bumps in odd places, shrouded in smoke, covered in 3D-printed spikes, snowflakes or eerie feathers, or cloaked in circular shapes and geometric patterns made of silicone, polyamide, metal or glass. This is the most radical impact of her posthuman aesthetic: the alienating and haunting denaturalisation of the human figure through technological mediation and new materials.¹⁵ See Smelik, ‘Fractal folds’.

Take, for instance, the Biophilia dress from the collection Escapism (look 18, S/S 2011), designed together with architect Daniel Widrig and inspired by the baroque sculptural work of artist Kris Kuksi.¹⁶On van Herpen’s website look 18 features a similar design in black as part of the Capriole collection; the archive no longer shows the Escapism collection. See ‘Capriole’, Iris van Herpen, https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/capriole/runway-17 accessed 5 May 2024. The blue dress was custom-made for Icelandic singer Björk for her Biophilia tour in 2012, and van Herpen continued to design for Björk’s performances in later years. I write ‘blue dress’, but is this a dress? Its bizarre forms are shaped by laser-cut semi-transparent acrylic sheets that bulge in strange places on the body. The grotesque shell-like shapes deform the human figure. The unusual forms indicate an escape from the normativity of the (female) body, from conventional naturalistic representations, sanctioned by centuries of art historical normativity and the dominance of the beauty ideal in fashion. This design is, I suggest, a ‘body without organs’, outside traditional organisation and representation.

The ‘body without organs’ (abbreviated as BwO) is a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980). This concept refers to a process of ‘becoming’, which involves undoing the ‘organized, signified, subjected’ body.¹⁷Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987 [1980], p. 161. The idea of a BwO is to undo the way in which social organisation of the embodied ‘self’ as a fixed and regulated form of identity.¹⁸See Anneke Smelik, ‘Gilles Deleuze: bodies-without-organs in the folds of fashion’, in Agnès Rocamora & Anneke Smelik (eds), Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, Bloomsbury, London, 2016, pp. 165–83. This means that one should re-organise the way in which the body is given meaning and in which we ourselves implement our sensorial and perceptive habits. Deleuze and Guattari claim that ‘the enemy is the organism’; that is, the way in which the organs are organised into a structure.¹⁹See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Behind this idea is the poststructuralist assumption, popularised also by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977), that power in human societies functions as a regulatory system of diffuse and controlling norms and values.²⁰See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Penguin, London, 1991 [1977]. The disciplining of bodies is highly normalised in contemporary fashion, through practices such as dieting, fitness, beauty routines and cosmetic surgery.²¹See Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, Polity, Cambridge, 2023 [2000]. The concept of the BwO undoes this disciplining practice and points instead to reorganising the way in which the body is given meaning and disciplined.

The notion of the body without organs can help to counter the ideas and images of what a body should look like. Designer fashion plays a double role here: on the one hand the world of high fashion conventionally reinforces the bodily ideal by showing impossibly thin and tall models on the catwalk. On the other hand, designer fashion often probes the limits of what a body can do or what it can become. Such designs, like the ones of Iris van Herpen, set the body in motion, potentially freeing it from a territorialised understanding of its matter.²²Anneke Smelik, ‘Fashioning the fold: multiple becomings’, in Rosi Braidotti & R. Dolphijn (eds), This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life, Brill/Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2014, pp. 37–55. In undoing – tentatively and temporarily – the central organisation of the body, identity can become more fluid and flexible.

This movement is generated by the very hybridity of the heterogeneous elements that van Herpen puts together. The process of combining the organic and the inorganic creates a dissonant effect and produces energy. The strident lack of harmony is not solved in an established form of closure by pleasing aesthetics, but by jarring forms refiguring the body. By deconstructive ways of dressing, high-end fashion designers like van Herpen and daring performers like Björk can move beyond merely representing the familiar contours of the human body and therefore beyond fixed forms of identity.²³Lucia Ruggerone, ‘The feeling of being dressed: affect studies and the clothed body’, Fashion Theory, vol. 21, no. 5, 2017, p. 585. Van Herpen’s designs can thus be understood as examples of bodies without organs. Through the high-tech designs the models transcend the boundaries of what a body can look like, becoming in-between characters. Looking at any of van Herpen’s innovative designs, one can see how the body without organs is dynamic, opening up to a multiplicity of intertwined lines, notches, gaps and fissures that together form a vortex, a maze or web.

Take, for example, the Aeternus dress. This gown was custom designed for American actress Gabrielle Union to wear to the Met Gala in New York in 2021. The dress is composed of over 10,000 spheres cut from a translucent white ‘liquid’ fabric and laser-cut with a fine silver reflective outline.²⁴I am grateful to the NGV for providing the information about the dress it purchased in 2022. Hand-stitched individually and layered in size gradients, the circular shapes create a seamless and multilevel optical illusion from which three-dimensional waves flare out weightlessly. The delicate and intricate handwork alone took over 1400 hours to make.

The Aeternus dress shares its aesthetic with van Herpen’s collection from that year Roots of Rebirth, (S/S 2021). For this collection she explored the interconnectedness of the human body and the natural world by weaving the enigmatic empire of fungi into her designs. Mimicking the fine threads of mycelium onto expandable lace enhanced with laser-cut organza, 3D and hand embroidery, the dresses form fractal networks that entwine the body, visualising ‘the entanglement of life that breathes beneath our feet’.²⁵ ‘Roots of Rebirth’, Iris van Herpen, https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/roots-of-rebirth/editorial-1, accessed 5 May 2024. Weaving a dialogue between fungi, the human body and technology, the designs become bodies without organs that move with a ‘living lace of spores’.²⁶ibid. The movement comes from the living power of the organic: the spores, fungi and all matter that go on living. Van Herpen replicates this energy through the inorganic by building interfaces and a shared habitat for the organic; each garment in the collection generating movement and performing a dance of materials.

This dance with materials creates intricate folds signifying a state of flux. As Deleuze suggests in his book The Fold (1988), insofar as matter can fold, it is capable of becoming.²⁷Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993 [1988], p. 37. The fold involves a process of opening out to the world.²⁸See Simon O’Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation, Palgrave/Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2006. The body is in constant flux, which works by ‘communication and propagation of movement’.²⁹Deleuze, The Fold, p. 97. The multilayered folds of the Aeternus dress, as in all of van Herpen’s designs, become pure movement from which the body can free itself. The perpetual motion in her collections show the body as incorporeal, a body of passions, affect and intensity. This shows that bodies without organs have the capacity of becoming.³⁰Stephen D. Seely, ‘How do you dress a body without organs? Affective fashion and nonhuman becoming’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1/2, spring/summer 2012, p. 251.

Becoming: the dance of materials
‘Becoming is a verb’, write Deleuze and Guattari.³¹Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 239. It is a dynamic process, and can be performed in the body without organs as we saw above. By experimenting and looking for new ways of becoming, one can move beyond the fixed and confined self, the ego-centred, self-aggrandising entity that is ‘organised, signified, subjected’.³²ibid., p. 161. The process of becoming also means to move beyond the static nature of matter and the dynamic nature of time. Deleuze and Guattari propose to ‘become-woman’, ‘become-animal’, ‘become-machine’, ‘become-molecular’ and to even ‘become-imperceptible’.³³See Smelik, ‘Gilles Deleuze’. The process of becoming understands the self as grounded and relational – as an eco-centric rather than an ego-centric entity. Becoming means to move as a node in a network of multiple relations, to set desires flowing by connecting to others – animals, plants, machines, molecules. It involves forming alliances with different affects, forces and intensities of life.

Fashion is a particularly interesting field because it moves between the material object and the imaginary realm, and in the case of van Herpen’s fashion, between these two realms by way of the technological. While art and popular culture can still be dismissed as mere fantasy, fashion actually produces material objects to be worn on the body. The models ‘become-other’ in assemblages of organic materials like fur, feathers and bones with artificial materials like silicon, solar cells or microprocessors. We can see the process of becoming-animal in the supernatural laser-cut silicon feathers in van Herpen’s collection Voltage, (S/S 2013), or the spores of mycelium in Roots of Rebirth. We see a becoming-organic in Hybrid Holism (A/W 2012) and Earthrise (A/W 2021), in which the high-tech designs look like coral reefs or swarms of insects or flocks of birds. She succeeds in catching a wave of water in a tangible form: a becoming-water in Sensory Seas, revisiting the famous splash of water in one of her earliest designs from Crystallisation.³⁴To be found as look 17 in Capriole on the website: ‘Capriole’, Iris van Herpen, https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/capriole/runway-17 accessed 5 May 2024. In the short film for the collection Carte Blanche, S/S 2023, the models dance under water, becoming dreamy Melusines, female water spirits.³⁵ See Carte Blanche, Julie Gautier & Iris van Herpen, 4 min 17 sec, 2023, https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/carte-blanche accessed 5 May 2024 Two years earlier, a short film showed Domitille Kiger, a world-champion skydiver, actually jumping from a plane wearing a gown from the Earthrise collection, A/W 2021.³⁶See Earthrise, Masha Vasyukova | Art + Commerce, 6 min 36 sec, 2021, https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/earthrise, accessed 5 May 2024. From the mycelium under the ground to the deep sea or the high skies, van Herpen’s designs are about becoming-other through symbiosis with nature, the body and technology. The multiple becomings are effectuated by bodies without organs, challenging the stratification of self and identity as well as exploding the categorical differences between traditional dualistic oppositions like organic/inorganic and nature/technology.

Most impressive in the last few years is the sense of fluidity, dynamic energy and shifting patterns in van Herpen’s designs, particularly Meta Morphism and Architectonics.

The fractal folds and distorted perspectives of these designs redefine fashion’s traditional boundaries by vibrating around the body. This indicates that the process of becoming is about perpetual change and transformation. Becoming is indeed a process of transformation and metamorphosis.³⁷ See Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Polity, Cambridge, 2002. The Ananda-Maya dress (Meta Morphism, A/W 2022) was, as the title indicates, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its themes of transformation.³⁸ See Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. A process of becoming implies constant movement and transformation, and in that sense Deleuze and Guattari foreground the vibrancy of matter and the dynamics of time. And so do Iris van Herpen’s designs.

The labyrinths of ripples, loops, folds, waves, twists, pleats, wrinkles and circles in van Herpen’s baroque designs make materials move, swing and sway. In her experiments with form, matter and time, she calls for a different relation to the body. The unstoppable movement points to ways of de-organising, de-stratifying and de-territorialising the human body. Morphing new silhouettes, Iris van Herpen invites the wearer to inhabit the freedom of co-creating the body as new shapes. Her designs function as interfaces between inside and outside, depth and surface, deep-sea diving and skydiving, engaging the wearer in a creative process of becoming, transforming the body and reinventing the self. In creating folds, rhizomes and entanglements, van Herpen’s voluminous designs open up an understanding of life as an infinite play of becoming – a dance of materials.

Anneke Smelik is Professor Emerita of Visual Culture at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Notes