Designer Iris van Herpen’s Paris Haute Couture Week algae dress is actually alive

PARIS – Couture, the oldest and most elite of the fashion arts, the pieces made by hand for the very few, can sometimes seem like a fossil preserved in an amber corset.

Which is why Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s work, both futuristic and deliberately kinetic, has always been so mesmerising: skirts that jounce like jellyfish, extrusions that tremble like palm fronds and sleeves (or sleeve-like appendages) that flutter like butterfly wings.

Even by her standards, however, the second look in the couture collection she showed in Paris on July 7 as part of Haute Couture Week was something else: It was actually alive.

Made of 125 million bioluminescent algae known as Pyrocystis lunula that glow in response to movement – think the luminescent plankton that can make the ocean seem lit from within – the dress-and-leggings combination was grown in a gelatin-like substance that was then moulded into one of van Herpen’s signature sci-fi anatomical lattice frocks.

Wearing it, the model resembled a very regal, otherworldly crustacean.

It had an aquatic tint and a squishy, jelly-like veneer. And though it did not exactly radiate megawatt beams when the model walked, it did emanate a soft blue haze. According to van Herpen, the look feels sort of visceral when worn. And for anyone wondering, it was not smelly.

More of an experiment than an actual for-sale item, the outfit was, 41-year-old van Herpen said backstage, “the next step in not being inspired by nature, but collaborating with nature”.

In other words, forget floral prints or rose embroideries. Think biological symbiosis.

The look was created in conjunction with Chris Bellamy, a biodesigner who began working on the project with van Herpen about five months ago. The algae were nurtured in seawater baths and then placed in a protective membrane (the one that became the dress), which has its own “house” – a kind of free-standing immersion tank – with specially monitored conditions, including humidity, temperature and light.

When it was not being worn, the dress was returned to its natural habitat – though even in the unnatural environment of a fashion show, the algae held their own (colour). Still, how long they will ultimately live, and what will happen to the outfit once they expire, is not exactly clear.

“No one knows,” van Herpen said with a chortle. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s very much like a human being in that sense. It needs eight hours of sleep, it needs sunlight, it needs not too much stress.”

The point of the living dress, she said, as with the rest of her collection, was to force a rethink of people’s relationship with the ocean – a theme that has been part of her work since 2017, when she immersed musicians in tanks of water for a show.

To that end, this season’s show opened with a performance involving lasers that danced across a gown made of what the show notes called Japanese “air fabric”.

One look that resembled a translucent ivory Slinky trailing around the body was made of Brewed Protein, a fibre from fermented plant-based materials by the Japanese biotech company Spiber. Another was formed from resin-coated silk, which resembled a wave caught in mid-froth.

As much as anything, however, her work, and especially the living dress, actually prompts a rethinking of people’s relationship with their wardrobes, and the way clothes need care in order to last. Not to mention a rethinking of the essence of couture.

As the laboratory of fashion, couture is defined by experimentation and the sort of pie-in-the-sky imagination that is only possible when price and time have no limit.

That is how you got a ruby crystal heart necklace that actually throbbed worn over a backward dress at Schiaparelli, the gown’s torso – complete with breastplate – layered over the spine.

It is how the team at Chanel, creating its final collection before the first show of new designer Matthieu Blazy, dreamed up the shaggy boucle “skins” that resembled bison pelts but were actually made from tulle and feathers, worn over the shoulders of their barbarian bourgeoisie (the best things in an otherwise lacklustre show).

Too often, however, couture seems as if it is preserving the know-how of the past – its embroideries, brocades and fairy tales – rather than trying to invent what is next.

Van Herpen’s work challenged all of that, simply by asking: What if a garment was not only constructed, but cultivated? NYTIMES