Björk believed the dress made her sing better. It was commissioned to wear for performances in support of Utopia—her breathy, love-struck record, full of birdsong and flute, where the Icelandic star imagines the apocalypse’s aftermath. Her vision isn’t one of destruction or doom but of generative and freeing mutation—where humans are merging with plant and bird life. The dress captured all of this, and then some. On Björk’s torso were cables, a kind of nervous system, gesturing outside of the body. At the cable’s ends were giant, satiny leaves, or perhaps bird feathers, that encircled her figure. On stage, the dress lit up and turned bioluminescent. “I think when I put the dress on,” Björk told the BBC later, “I kind of embody [Iris’s] splendidness.”

The splendidness of Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s work comes down to its many collisions and contradictions. These fashion pieces, mostly dresses, are sculptural marvels that are never stiff— they remain malleable and moveable. She recreates fleeting phenomenons of nature—chrysalis, lava flowing, bubbling condensation—though through technological materials and methods. Her clothing is extraterrestrial and speculative but always hints at existing biological systems (to me, her gowns often resemble a sea urchin or human body split into two, with all its muscles, tissue, and skeletal forms placed gloriously on display). Then there is the fact that her official title is ‘fashion designer’, though her work is more at home in art museums than in wealthy women’s closets. Anthony Howe, a kinetic sculptor, who worked with Herpen in 2019 to create a minidress spouting feathered wings, which spun as the model walked, said it best: “Calling Iris a designer is a nomenclature…She’s an artist who happens to make things that fit on the human form. Yes, it has everything to have to do with a model, a human form. But what she does is way beyond that. Way beyond.”

In November last year, Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs—the latest museum dedicated to the decorative arts in Europe—staged a solo exhibition of her work, Sculpting the Senses. At 39 years old, van Herpen was the youngest female designer in the museum’s 140 years to receive a solo show. Now, this exhibition has made its way to the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Brisbane. There will be a hundred of van Herpen’s dresses (including the 2011 snake dress, another Björk favourite, where the body looks like it is being swallowed by thick, shiny coils of black), and glimpses at her strange, beguiling materials (silicon, organza, mylar, steel), but also objects and art related to her couture: fossils, 19th-century botanical illustrations, sound compositions and artworks constructed by bees.

Van Herpen, with her oval face, slender frame and cascading auburn locks, looks very much like a portrait from the Northern Renaissance period. Her upbringing, in a way, resembles one too. She grew up in a rural Dutch village, right next to a river. Her hippy parents outlawed technology and television in the home, so van Herpen and her siblings took to nature. She spent her days outdoors and studying ballet. Her interest in clothes emerged when she discovered a trove of old outfits owned by one of her grandmothers, stashed away in the attic.

Her childhood goes some way in explaining a great preoccupation of her work, that seems to arise again and again across her corpus: water. In her couture, she is often attempting to recreate water’s impermanent shape and omnipresent movement. Her 2020 Sensory Sea and Nautiloid dresses are bulbous, buoyant creations, that capture the murky, kaleidoscopic depths of the ocean. In 2011, she sent models down the runway in tight, robotic dresses surrounded by a suspended splash of fake H20. The material used to craft this illusion was a propriety acrylic that did not discolour or grow opaque when heated. At GOMA, one will be able to see perhaps her greatest achievement with the material: 2013’s ‘Water dress’, where rivers of plastic cascade down the body, fanning out just above the knees, looking like waves crashing into an invisible shore.

These watery creations reminded me of Tarjei Vesaas’s wonderful and unnerving Norweigan novel The Ice Palace, published in 1963. The book centres on the disappearance of an 11-year-old girl named Unn, who vanishes after wagging school to investigate a waterfall that in winter has transformed into a towering glacial castle, where trickles of water have turned into branches and walls have been formed by thick sheets of ice. What Vesaas writes, as Unn walks from ice room to ice room, completely entranced by the frozen structure, could very well describe the allure of van Herpen’s designs: “There were things here, too, that could not be described as either the one or the other—but they belonged to such a place and one had to accept everything as it came. She stared wide-eyed into a strange fairytale.”

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses
Gallery of Modern Art
29 June—7 October

This article was originally published in the July/August 2024 print edition of Art Guide Australia.