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Earlier this year (February to May), the Carnegie Museum of Art hosted a retrospective of Iris van Herpen’s fashion designs called Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion that featured clothes from 15 of her collections. She is credited to be the first designer to send a 3-D printed dress down the runway. Her dresses are meticulous and overwhelming in detail but she is able to create these intricate dresses through her process of integrating traditional craftsmanship with computers and digital fabrication. Although this particular merging is apparent in the majority of her collections, I think one the most note able collections to mention is Escapism. To me, this is the collection that mostly reads as fashion that merges with digital fabrication as well as meticulous craft. It was also one of her beginning collections to feature more than one 3-D printed dresses on the runway.

In Escapism, Herpen explores the concept of emptiness and how emptiness plays with form to create fantastical and grotesque feelings. Although I couldn’t find information on the particular algorithms used, I do know her process is collaborative as she works with architects like, Daniel Widrig, to 3-D print her desired designs. In this collection, they were able to create a lace-like structure that didn’t require a needle to construct the parts together. Together, they weaved into a coral-like, organic design. Most of the dresses in this collection remind me of the way sine waves move and billow together when programmed correctly.

Herpen became successful because of her unique melding of the two worlds; not just using the machine to replace the traditional process. In an interview with Vogue, she clarified that designing the dress is mostly hand crafted because of the inventive ways the designers need to create to sew the printed components together. In this way, her voice as a traditional artist is still prominent because she uses the machine to support her process, not become it.

Sources:

Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion

http://www.irisvanherpen.com/behind-the-scenes/escapism

http://www.irisvanherpen.com/haute-couture/crystallization