Shift Souls & Hypnosis

Iris van Herpen and Philip Beesley collaborated in the development of the material Glitch, which debuted in Iris van Herpen’s Spring 2019 collection Shift Souls. The material made another appearance in the Fall 2019 collection Hypnosis. Glitch is made by laser-cutting Mylar into computer-generated wave patterns, creating a rippling effect when draped on a body and oscillating as the wearer moves. The Shift Souls collection was inspired by early examples of celestial cartography and its representations of mythological and astrological chimera. 

“For ‘Shift Souls’ I looked at the evolution of the human shape, its idealization through time and the hybridization of the female forms within mythology. Specially the imagination and the fluidity within identity change in Japanese mythology gave me the inspiration to explore the deeper meaning of identity and how immaterial and mutable it can become within the current coalescence of our digital bodies.” — Iris van Herpen