It is possible that the most dazzling couture show in Paris this week is not actually taking place on a runway at all, but in an entirely different sort of setting. Possible that said couture show is not an invitation-only affair with gold ballroom chairs and the latest celebrity du jour, but rather one open to the public. And certain that it is less about nostalgia for a past when couture was defined by the whispering of silk satin ball gowns, and more about a dream of the future.
The show in question? “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” a one-woman exhibition that opened at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in late November and scheduled to run through April 28.
Five years in the making, “Sculpting the Senses” crystallizes why Ms. van Herpen, 39, is the youngest female designer to be granted a solo show at the museum in its 140 years of existence. And why, more than a decade after being invited to join the ranks of Paris’s couturiers, Ms. van Herpen has also been made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, an honor presented by the French Ministry of Culture.
“She has managed to create a unique world, somewhere between fairy tale and science fiction,” said Christine Macel, director of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “In my opinion, she is unique and essential.”
Though couture is generally referred to as fashion’s “laboratory,” its place of “experimentation” — in part because, as a made-to-order art, it can be as wildly inaccessible and expensive as it needs to be — it also is often treated as an anachronism. Seen as a relic of another time, before technology; part of a cultural legacy, sure, but without much use beyond the red carpet and fabulous Instagram content.
Ms. van Herpen’s work, which takes the whole idea of the “lab” at face value (she is a regular visitor to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and there three microscopes are included in the exhibition), is an authoritative rebuttal of this idea, made in cloth.
