Highlights Tour | Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses

Welcome to the Brooklyn Museum and the exhibition Iris Van Herpen Sculpting the Senses. This is a mid-career retrospective of a Dutch fashion designer who's been working at the intersection of technology and handcraft. The exhibition takes place in 11 sections starting from the microscopic inside the world that we see in water and plants and it goes through the telescopic into outer space into the cosmos. Our first section is about water in all of its forms. If you saw Eileen Gu at the recent Magdala, you would have seen her dressed in one of Iris Van Herpen's most signature designs, the bubble dress. That's a new version of an idea that began in 2016 with the side Jaco dress which we have in the exhibition and it's made from both hollow glass spheres and solid glass spheres. But it was Iris's first evocation of this idea and [music] it came to weigh 95 lb. But today's version that Eileen's wearing is much lighter and even includes motorized helium filled bubbles coming out of it. And now we'll go to the second section, Sensory Sea Life, this way. >> [music] >> Iris Van Herpen was a dancer for much of her early life studying ballet and so movement in the area around the body has been very important. She [music] often has thought about things such as collaborating with swimmers to create [music] designs to be worn in water and this particular collection, [music] Sensory Sea Life, evokes a lot of the forms and colors that one might see inside of an oceanic sea environment. This particular work is printed on a glass organza fabric, sometimes called air organza. It's made from filaments that are 1/5 the width of a human hair. And so it has a very light, airy quality to it. But to create this very structural form, Iris has printed each layer of this particular dress individually, and then it's edged [music] in PETG, which is a type of clear plexiglass that's bonded onto the individual layers of this organic fabric. So when the dancer or model is moving in it, it really seems to give the effect of floating through space. In this section, we're in Forces Behind the Forms. And we're thinking about things like coral, which we see in the ocean, and they look that they're static, but they're actually living organisms. Honeycombs that are created by bees, termite [music] mounds you might see in an African savanna, and also things like birds' nests. We think, for example, [music] about bowerbirds. They create U-shaped nests, and they put little blueberries in it in order to attract mates. So these structures are also [music] very inspiring for Iris. For these particular dresses, they collaborated with an organization known as Parley for the Oceans. It's the organization that identified the huge island of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean. They spent a lot of time cleaning that up, and all of the plastic they gathered was then repurposed. In this particular case, it created threads that were woven into [music] fabrics that Iris used for these particular designs. >> [music] >> In this section, the Alchemic Atelier, we look at Iris Van Herpen's working process. Behind me, we see a video installation created for the Brooklyn Museum's Rotunda space, in which we see small movements that take place in the atelier, but they're amplified in order to show the process in which the garments are made. It's non-edited. It's in real time. In order for people to understand the slowness that's involved and the many hours that are needed [music] and required to create these types of gowns and dresses. Lining the walls of this gallery are [music] many textile experiments. Some are 2D, some are 3D, many in collaboration with Philip Beesley, who is a part of Living Architecture [music] Systems in Toronto. Together, they've produced many different materials that you'll see in Iris's work. So, as you go through these various boards on the walls, you might [music] take note of her particular pattern or design, which you'll then [music] see realized in a gown or dress later in the exhibition. >> [music] >> In this section, we're looking at the concept of synesthesia. If you've ever tightened your eyelids very tight and saw colors, those are called phosphenes. But, synesthesia takes [music] that to another level, which is that it's having a stimulus having a a reaction. So, for example, if you listen to music and see colors. So, Iris is very much interested in these synesthetic effects. I was very [music] interested when I read Iris van Herpen's Daedalus kimono dress, which we [music] have in this shot. Because she was interested in the idea that she wanted to make a dress that [music] could be out of focus. Often times in fashion we talk about silhouettes. And for Iris she was interested in making a dress that [music] would had an undefinable shape or a shape that continually mutated. We're showing that dress in the exhibition with a [music] work from the permanent collection by Tony Costa, Visual Dynamic from 1968, >> [music] >> which is an op art artwork. So when you're standing in front of it and you move, the artwork [music] keeps changing. So it felt very much in dialogue [music] with Iris van Herpen's Daedalus kimono dress. We're now in the section skeletal embodiment. [music] Iris van Herpen is both interested in the skeleton within our our own human bodies, as well as skeletons [music] in other forms. On the wall of this gallery for example, you'll see a skeleton from an Ichthyosaurus, which is a 180 million year old fossil set in shale. We have a baby dinosaur skeleton in the room. They're all resonating with Iris's designs, on which you might [music] find for example bird skeletons. Behind me is a 3D printed garment. We're looking at the crystallization [music] top, her first one, and considered by many to be the first one in haute couture. And [music] it was printed over the course of eight days, 24 hours a day. And the final [music] form evokes both traditional ruffs that you might see in Dutch painting, as well as vertebrae. [music] Next we're going to go in the section titled The Mythology of [music] fear. In this section, we're looking at various structures that we find in nature that sometimes people find a little bit scary. We have in this section [music] an artwork that was a collaboration with tarantula spiders, for example, by a group Ecologic Studio in London, uh who created the work Xenoderma. Behind me, you see Iris Van Herpen's [music] very famous snake dress. When it came out in 2011 on the runway, it actually had an air apparatus [music] inside of it, so the snakes appeared to be moving. And this sense of that snakes can both constrict us and move at the same time can [music] create uh fear uh within us. We are now in the section Growth Systems. In Growth Systems, we're really [music] talking about WWW, World Wide Web. So, we're looking [music] at the different patterns and structures that we see underneath the earth. [music] For Iris, she's very much interested in mycelium networks, the communication that [music] happens between mushroom and fungi uh underneath. All plants are in some [music] ways informed by and exchanging information, much like we do today [music] in the World Wide Web. Behind me, we see her cathedral dress. It's a second year that she was working with a group called Materialise, [music] who made the crystallization uh jacket. So, it's also made using SLS, selective laser sintering, [music] but the structure of it's very different. Here, we're looking at something informed by Gothic architecture. A lot of Gothic architecture is actually informed by roots that we see under trees or tree branches. So, when you look up at the cathedral, it's very branch-like. After it was uh SLS printed, it was then electroplated in copper. So, it's been changing color over this decade, becoming more wooden-like, >> [music] >> uh much in reference to the trees that we were talking about earlier. Next to it is a work from our permanent collection, which is a [music] mid-19th century Gothic Revival corner chair. We're now in the section titled Cosmic Bloom. And when I first began working on this section with Iris, she said, "Do you think we can make the mannequins float and collaborate [music] with NASA?" We didn't collaborate with NASA, but perhaps in the future, but we do want to give the sense of floating, that the designs were not fixed by gravity. And so, a lot of the mannequins in this particular section are sideways or [music] upside down. Behind me, uh we see a design titled Hollow Beyond, made on a beautiful tulle fabric. But you'll see the design of it's very intricate. [music] It includes over 2,000 individual pieces, which were applied onto this tulle. And it creates both a graphic pattern. It can seem very [music] geometric, but it's also flowing because the spaces between the pattern are have a tulle, and so it's very flexible, also. Next to it, we have it juxtaposed with a work by [music] Chen Kwan Young, a South Korean artist, who when he was a child, [music] had a great uncle who had a traditional medicine store. And so, he said as a child, when he was just a few feet tall, would look up at the ceiling, he would see all these bundles of materials inside traditional mulberry paper. So, Quan Yang adapted that idea when he started making artwork, and his particular pieces he likes to think of them as moonscapes. And the [music] last section of the exhibition is titled New Nature. You might remember, for example, [music] during the Pierre Cardin exhibition, we looked at visions for the future, and his visions were in the 1960s. Today, we're in [music] the 2020s, and these are Iris van Herpen's visions of [music] what she thinks people will be dressing like in the future. To the left of me is a work from her [music] collection Voltage. We began the exhibition talking about the bubble [music] dress. That was an evocation of all of the air inside of our bodies. This particular work [music] is looking at the electricity inside of our bodies. In the exhibition, we have works by the neurologist Santiago [music] Ramón y Cajal. In the early 19th century, he was the first one to draw neuroanatomy inside of us. So, Iris is interested in the air, the skeletons, and the electricity. So, for her Voltage [music] collection, she actually had the model performing the Tesla coil in front of the audience. Electricity coming out of [music] the fingers. And she's interested in that kind of chaos that electricity creates. So, these dresses are evocations of that radiating electricity coming out of us. I hope you've enjoyed our short tour today of Iris van Herpen's Sculpting the [music] Senses, and we look forward to seeing you in the galleries. >> Mhm.