Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses

The exhibition Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is an immersive and sensory exploration into the designer’s universe, fusing fashion, contemporary art, design and science to invite audiences to rethink the relationship between our body and the space around us. Presented within Van Herpen’s retrospective at the Museum, Philip Beesley’s work will include a large atelier space presenting the experimental fabrics, textiles and forms developed between the two makers that have gone on to be incorporated into Van Herpen’s dresses as well as Beesley’s immersive installations.

The exhibition will also feature a series of giant projections that inaugurate Living Shadows. This innovative technology combines physical dresses, expressive physical shadows, and virtual digital ‘twins’ creating dream-like shadow-worlds. Giant halo-like spaces radiating around each dress are filled with growing, multiplying, interacting forms, expanding the physical fabrics of the couture into animated worlds of possibility. A virtual world is created that is closely connected to the real world, but which cannot actually be there. Are they shadows of dreams? Living Shadows will be presented with selected dresses that are now iconic, including Van Herpen’s “Voltage” dress, and the ‘Snake’ dress famously worn by Lady Gaga among many others.