Additional inspiration comes from the artist Kim Keever, the aquatic expressionist based in New York who merges the disciplines of painting and photography. À former NASA engineer, Keever experiments with the idea of ephemerality and movement in large scale photographs of liquid clouds of colors. Van Herpen collaborated with Keever on translucent layered cloud dresses of his signature work.
The collection consists of eighteen looks with a concentration on dissected and voluminous layering, and a warm color palette of ochre, Nrian purple, and indigo pigments.
The Harmonia silhouettes are voluminous spheroid dresses that unfold vibrant patterns through translucent gradient-dyed organza that is halfwheel plissé-ed by hand. The ‘Symbiotic’ volumes are made from gradient dyed silks that are multi-layered into sculptural shapes by a fine 3D laser-cut frame of PETG to create hybrid bird shapes in dimensional color gradations that hover in symbiosis with the body like mythological creatures.”Shift souls’ hide and reveal anamorphic faces that smoke around the body in three-dimensional ‘wave drawings’, multi-layered and gradient-dyed silks are heat-bonded within frames of laser-cut mylar, creating surreal spectral anatomies. For the ‘Galactic glitch’ technique, cloud-printed silk is heat-bonded to mylar and laser-cut into the finest lace of thousands of O.5mm ‘harmonica waves’, creating a dance of quivering echoes that optically distort the body.

© Courtesy of Iris Van Herpen
The “Cosmica’ looks are made from vaporous colored clouds by Kim Keever that are printed on translucent organza, to be layered into nebulous multi-dimensional prints, whose unfinished contours blur the body.
Cellchemy’ face-jewelry are 3D printed through high-resolution multi-material printer in collaboration with the Delit University of Technology. One-off pieces were developed through a generative design process based on a 3D face scan, by combining the color information with the 3D shape in grasshopper algorithm, a semi-arbitrary density structure was mapped from the face.
For the finale of the show, Iris van Herpen collaborated with contemporary artist Nick Verstand, subdividing the space using walls of materialized laser light, revealing a dreamscape of circulating clouds.