Magnetic Motion
Centre Pompidou, Paris Fashion Week
Paris, France - 2014
Philip Beesley and radical fashion designer Iris Van Herpen extended their longstanding collaboration, with Beesley’s contributions to ten dresses from her new Magnetic Motion collection, presented at Centre Pompidou for Paris Fashion Week on September 30. Supported by advanced computational modeling and industrial design, the collaborators’ innovative designs combine precisely detailed polymer, crystal and leather components into interlinking three-dimensional fabric structures with striking qualities of flexibility, sparkle and transparency.
The new engineered fabrics bridge between courture and ready-to-wear. One piece suggests hovering, aura-like waffle-shells using delicate thermoformed acrylics connected by silicone links. Another uses a hybrid pleat inspired by the early-twentieth-century designer Mariano Fortuny, expanded into a corrugated meshwork that combines leather, transparent polymer links and crystalline inclusions.
The collaboration has been growing in momentum with Iris van Herpen’s launch of ready-to-wear lines of clothing that translates the radical experiment of her haute couture explorations into comfortable, highly finished form-fitting clothing. Critics acclaimed the new work, ‘The most powerful fashion mix of nature and technology that I have ever seen’- Suzy Menkes, Vogue; ‘Piece de Resistance’- Joanne Furniss, Style.com.
