Iris Van Herpen

Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen (1984) is renowned for her innovative designs combining sartorial craftsmanship with cutting-edge technology. In her designs, she intertwines the digital and the material, the human and the nonhuman, and the natural and technological. Van Herpen is inspired by spider webs, coral reefs, the rhizomic roots of fungi, undulating waves of water or smoke, marine organisms, and the dendrites and synapses of organic life. In this book, Anneke Smelik shows that Van Herpen’s highly technological designs can be considered posthuman fashion, as they feature the intertwining relationship between the organic and the inorganic. In creating folds, rhizomes, and entanglements, Van Herpen’s designs open up to an understanding of life as an infinite play of becoming—a dance of materials.