Over the previous years of couture week, Iris van Herpen has undoubtedly been showcasing sensational collections one after another. She has consistently offered a gamut of brilliantly engineered fabric manipulations that never failed to make a person swoon over her creations.
As she tapped through the futuristic domain this season, her “Shift Souls” collection featured the “Harmonia Macrocosmica,” a 17th-century-star atlas. That’s why with the beauty of the celestial cartography guiding her, the Dutch designer remarkably explored the pulchritude of colors and forms.
It was as if there were cosmic forces that magically created such exquisite dresses. From her series of sculpturally-shaped ensembles to voluminous, cloud-like dresses in translucent organza (a collaboration with New York-based artist and former NASA engineer Kim Keever), every piece was an exquisite surrealist artwork.
Iris van Herpen is one of my favourite designers. And after yesterday’s show, I want a pair of these shoes: https://t.co/tSSEeXFMmN pic.twitter.com/XlSGZB4Ns3
— Elizabeth Paton (@LizziePaton) January 22, 2019
But setting aside all the stunning dresses, the pièce de resistance during the show was truly her glow-in-the-dark heels. This allowed Iris to impressively end her show. Upon dimming the lights of the runway, an opulent amount of transparent plexiglass heels lit up in the dark room.
According to Elizabeth Paton of the New York Times, it took four days to create the shoes. Blocks of the material were infused with two colors of ink, then eventually, the heels were carved by hand into undulating curves. This only proves that the future of fashion is not that far anymore. After all, to design is limitless, which is why Iris looked beyond what our world could offer and channeled the beauty of the unknown heavens.
