Fashion designer Iris van Herpen’s High show features futuristic flair

For a woman who creates clothing defined by radical experimentation and incredible sex appeal, Dutch designer Iris van Herpen is a remarkably subdued, contemplative type.

Sitting in the third-floor gallery of the High Museum's Anne Cox Chambers wing, surrounded by her beautiful, radical clothing designs featured in the exhibition "Iris van Herpen: Transforming Fashion," the designer nibbles on a croissant and drinks Starbucks coffee, her tiny frame bundled into an enveloping sweater and dress of her own design.

With a demeanor more like an intellectually curious visual artist, in person van Herpen seems cut from a different cloth than the avant-garde iconoclasts who often wear her cutting-edge designs: women like renegade aristocrat Daphne Guinness, and larger-than-life performers like Lady Gaga, Bjork and Beyonce.

Van Herpen’s visionary designs have worked their way into the science fiction film “Lucy,” into costumes for the New York City Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet. Taylor Swift sports a pair of sinister, hooflike van Herpen boots in her “Bad Blood” video. Those science-fiction “Biopiracy” boots are among the stunning designs on view through May 2016 at the High, in the museum’s first-ever fashion exhibition.

In town for the opening of “Transforming Fashion,” van Herpen attended a donor dinner in her honor the night before, where she said she found it “heart-warming” how many of the assembled guests expressed their pleasure in the exhibition and her designs.

“People here are so warm, and welcoming and open,” she says.

“In Holland, people in general are much more closed,” she admits. Considering fashion’s reputation as a more feminine pursuit, she was particularly delighted by the number of men who approached her, captivated by the technology and materials she uses to achieve her designs. “I was a bit blown away by that.”

Drawing inspiration from art, science and technology, this celebrated fashion designer creates bold, futuristic clothes that feel more like sculpture than the mundane cotton and wool shells adorning our own bodies. Van Herpen is as likely to pull ideas from the Elizabethan era, samurai armor and Gothic architecture as from sexy, cutting-edge technology like 3-D printing. Van Herpen is also deeply affected by the natural world, by the human body, by the unseen operations of microorganisms, electricity, radiation and magnetic fields.

She’s used materials as unexpected as silicone, the PET plastic used in water bottles, hand-blown glass, iron filings, polyurethane resin, the Dragon Skin that Hollywood uses for special effects and even the ribs of children’s umbrellas in her designs. She longs to collaborate with NASA and dive deeper into 4-D and robotic printing.

On a tour around the gallery, van Herpen points out the shape-shifting delights of her clothes, which can read as soft feathers or mohair from a distance. Up close, they have an utterly different effect. She points out the featherlike projections of the “Wilderness Embodied” dress from her July 2013 collection. In reality, those “feathers” are flesh-colored, laser-cut silicone. Look closer and you can see angry birds’ heads exploding from the dress, as if struggling to escape.

“When you move in this, it sort of vibrates in all directions,” says van Herpen.

Realizing her designs can often be incredibly time-consuming.

A “Voltage” dress on view at the High crafted from mirror foil that looks like a deconstructed disco ball took over a year to create. Van Herpen tries on all of her garments, and she creates a duplicate copy of her one-of-a-kind dresses for her archive.

Though her use of cutting-edge technologies have caused some to see her work as consistently beholden to technology, in reality it’s just a means to an end, a way to realize forms and ideas hard to execute with traditional fabrics and techniques.

“Technology on its own is not an inspiration for me,” says van Herpen. “I think I get a lot more inspiration from the arts, or science or dance. But I do see it as a tool to express my emotion, my structures, my ideas.”

Van Herpen, who grew up in a small farming village, spent her childhood studying classical ballet, painting and violin.

She eventually attended Arnhem’s prestigious art school Artez, where she discovered an intense pleasure in working with her hands.

“When I design, I go into a sort of meditative state, and that’s really because of the interaction between my hands and the material … it’s a very intuitive state.

“It’s similar to dance,” she says. “The knowledge is really inside the body.”

Not the kind to hit the party scene, van Herpen clearly prefers her work above everything.

“I very much like to be in my atelier, to be in my own zone. I’m not such a social person,” admits van Herpen. “I really need my own space and my own peace.

“The reason I’m in Amsterdam is because I have this wonderful atelier, it’s like an old warehouse on the water, beautiful view and it’s filled with artists from all different disciplines.” She beams, “It’s perfect.”

Instead of sourcing something like handcrafted wooden buttons from some distant Chinese factory, van Herpen says, “when we need something, we can go somewhere in the building. It’s all very craft-based, the whole space.”

Describing herself as much as her fellow Amsterdam creatives, van Herpen smiles. “These are all people that really have their heart in their work.”