LIFE BEYOND FIRST CLASS
ARTS & COLLECTIBLES
SCULPTING THE SENSES
AND DEFYING THE POSSIBLE
Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is a breathtaking journey through fifteen years of visionary couture, where art, science, and nature converge in garments that don’t just dress the body—they awaken it.
To encounter the work of Iris van Herpen is to be awestruck—not by excess, but by intricacy. By movement. By the silent force of imagination that whispers rather than shouts. Her couture creations don’t walk so much as levitate, ripple, or bloom. They don’t hug the body—they converse with it. And for those who have long regarded fashion as mere surface, van Herpen offers a quiet but radical correction: here, the garment becomes philosophy in motion.
Now, with the release of Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses (Lannoo Publishers), the full scope of her boundary-dissolving vision is brought to life in 336 exquisite pages. This is no glossy retrospective or mere fashion catalog—it is a deep, meditative immersion into the mind of an artist who sculpts not with clay, but with air, sound, and sensation.
The book, co-authored by van Herpen and Cloé Pitiot, traces fifteen years of artistic evolution that reads more like an architectural practice than a fashion career. We see how the Dutch couturière collaborates with physicists, marine biologists, choreographers, and technologists—often on the molecular level—to bring to life pieces that seem to emerge from nature’s own blueprint. These aren’t garments—they’re living, breathing systems of thought, emotion, and scientific curiosity.
Iris Van Herpen
As actress and longtime admirer Tilda Swinton writes in the foreword, “Iris initiates a dance with our grasp on possibility.” That dance has rarely felt more profound than in Sympoiesis, her recent Paris Haute Couture collection. Inspired by the interconnectedness of all living things, the pieces ripple like kelp in an undersea current, or take the form of sea anemones mid-transformation—yet each detail is grounded in rigorous construction and fine craftsmanship. She doesn’t just reference nature—she channels it.
The title Sculpting the Senses could not be more apt. Van Herpen’s work invites a full-body response; it is felt before it is understood. The book’s 200+ photographs capture that sensorial quality with astonishing clarity—from the gravity-defying materials to the micro-details of textile manipulations that mimic everything from mycelial networks to bird plumage.
But beyond the imagery, it’s the ideas that truly soar. Through a series of thoughtful essays and behind-the-scenes vignettes, readers come to understand van Herpen’s relentless commitment to exploration. We see her sketchbooks filled with studies of movement. We glimpse her studio, where digital modeling meets centuries-old handcraft. We listen in on dialogues between art and science, between fluidity and structure, between the human body and the cosmos that shapes it.
This is a book for those who collect not simply for beauty, but for meaning. For those who understand that couture—true couture—is not just rare, but resonant. In an age of fast everything, van Herpen moves deliberately, intimately, and with a sense of wonder. Her garments don’t just clothe; they awaken.
Whether you’re a collector, a designer, a scientist, or someone who believes that the future of creativity lies in cross-pollination, Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is an essential artifact. It honors not only the garments themselves but the forces that shaped them—and the dreams they invite us to share.
This isn’t just fashion. This is possibility, sculpted into being.
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