The best haute couture ultimately comes down to mastery over materials, if one thinks about how, for example, Yves Saint Laurent was able to realize an off-the-shoulder dress wherein the flesh would meld almost imperceptibly with black velvet, a notoriously slippery and uncooperative fabric.
Iris Van Herpen’s fall couture collection involved out-there materials that even science is still grappling with — plasma, the mysterious matter responsible for aurora borealis, and also lightning.
The plasma, which reacts to the body’s magnetic field, was inserted in waning-crescent-shaped glass tubes swooping out from the shoulder of a tulle dress covered in hand-blown glass bubbles. It crackled and glowed mysteriously.
“There are 30,000 glass spheres in the collection,” the designer noted.
Van Herpen’s strapless lightning minidress in an annealing PMMA, meanwhile, required a particle accelerator, a cryogenic crate capable of maintaining minus 100 Celsius temperatures — and heaps of imagination.
For Van Herpen also excels at another key aspect of haute couture — evoking wonder through the otherworldly allure of her clothes and the extreme craftsmanship, boldly going where no designer has gone before.
Hers is also a consciousness-raising form of couture. After opening the crate and discovering the Lichtenberg figures that had erupted across her molded, glass-like dress, van Herpen said she began seeing fern-like patterns everywhere in nature, for they exist in root systems, river deltas and the human circulatory system.
“I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but when we were working on this look, we had the biggest thunderstorms I’ve ever experience in my life in the Netherlands,” she related. “I love looking at it, it’s so beautiful. I love the sound, and I love the scent as well.…That was actually the same scent when the dress went into the particle accelerator.”
The plasma and lightning dresses rank as museum pieces that can’t be commercialized, and you looked out for them at her show, which had models vamping it up at the Élysée Montmartre concert venue, the floor boiling with dry ice and lit dramatically.
In between were familiar van Herpen silhouettes and techniques, including Japanese “air” fabric suspended on wires and billowing gowns in printed silks, or silver-flecked chiffon. She also continued to elaborate on her bubble dresses, introduced in charming fashion by Eileen Gu at the Met Gala last May.
Many couture houses are only just catching up with van Herpen’s long fascination with the natural world and now she’s flung herself into outer space, where stars quake and plasma predominates.
“The collection is really about all those forces that are influencing us in daily life, but that we don’t know so much about, and that we cannot influence,” she mused. “The more I explore through science, the more I realize how little we know. It’s humbling.”
Backstage at Iris Van Herpen fall 2026 couture show
Courtesy of Iris Van Herpen
