By Janice Breen Burns
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Weird fashions get such a hammering, particularly on social media. āPointlessā, āNopeā and āWhere would you wear it?ā are pretty typical among comments on any post with, say, an oddball Iris van Herpen, a strange Schiaparelli or anything, really, on a Rick Owens runway.
Thereās also a doctorateās worth of theories about why so many scoffers and trolls are genuinely angered by offbeat and āconceptualā clothes: āBahaha!! F*&#@ing Stupid!!ā, for example. There are measurable levels of loathing for fashion in those !!!s.
Vogue legend Anna Wintour once observed that some of us feel threatened by fashion. We feel self-conscious and judged and, in our deepest doubting selves, fear getting our fashion choices wrong which ā stringing that theory to its rim ā could mean a ānopeā to being liked or, god forbid, even loved.
Itās all horribly complicated but itās also this madly human tangle of psycho-social baggage that we bring, not only to our own wardrobes but ā crank that up and add steroids ā to the weird stuff academics and fashionistocrats charitably call āideas-drivenā fashion.
āIf youāre walking into an exhibition, or youāre seeing some outlandish, extremely artistic thing being worn at an awards ceremony by a celebrity you like,ā explains associate professor Lauren Rosewarne of the University of Melbourne, āremember youāre going to bring a different set of judgments to that than something you might see in Kmart.ā
Iris van HerpenāsĀ Ananda-Maya gown, 2022, left, and Schiaparelliās Look 6 from the Matador Couture collection 2021-22 can be seen at this yearās Triennial.
Which brings us neatly back to Schiaparelli and Iris van Herpen and their spots in the National Gallery of Victoriaās sprawling multi-floor Triennial exhibition, opening next week. The Schiaparelli group of 20-odd surrealist-inspired accessories and gowns is by American designer Daniel Roseberry, the current creative director. His tether to the mythically visionary Elsa Schiaparelli, who established her legacy fashion house almost a century ago in Paris, is obvious.
Schiaparelliās offbeat aesthetic and collaborations with artists Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and others echo in spatters of celestial iconography and the elegant body bits strewn across Roseberryās collection.
Designs by Maison Schiaparelli featuring at this yearās NGV Triennial: jacket (top) and jewellery bustier from the Matador Couture collection.Credit: Courtesy Maison Schiaparelli
Heās cast eyes, noses and lips into gold jewels and spectacles, for example, and disturbingly witchy fingers and toe extensions. A golden face mask requires the wearer to bite into it to keep it in place, and a ā whaaaaat!? ā ābroochā features full-sized maternal breast with feeding golden baby attached.
A model wears SchiaparelliĀ couture for the autumn 2022 fashion show in Paris.Credit: New York Times
Roseberryās work also resonates with his ācelebrity darlingā status, a golden goal since he joined the house from quirky US brand Thom Browne in 2019. He set out to dress A-listers, and did just that and more every season: Beyonce, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, a string of Kardashians (who could forget Kylie Jennerās lionās head frock from January?).
From left, Gwendoline Christie in Iris van Herpen, Kylie Jenner in Schiaparelli and Janelle MonƔe in van Herpen.Credit: Getty Images
Lean in to the shimmering, thickly beaded gold mini gown Beyonce wore for Vogue, for example; itās his miracle of haute couture craftsmanship. Or a black silk coat from his spring/summer 2022 collection (also showing at NGV), sharply schlooped into actress Gillian Andersonās waistline by a cunning arrangement of gored panels (an invention of Elsa Schiaparelli), not corsetry as you might expect, with gold embellished āghost corsetā heavily embroidered into the front.
Enigmatic Dutch designer Iris van Herpenās Triennial exhibit, āAnanda-Mayaā from her autumn/winter 22/23 Meta Morphism collection, is equally spectacular. She created it in all-white materials with a central spindly carapace of twisting, thickly embroidered synthetic ribs anchoring tendrils of stiffened mesh that appear to roil and swirl like smoke around the body. Matching 3D printed platform shoes are spiky and white as bleached coral.
The beauty is strange, utterly impractical. āHow would you sit in that,ā was overheard at van Herpenās haute couture show. Only the right-sized celebrity heading up the right red carpet or the most intellectually engaged of her haute couture clients with a lazy $100,000 (Iām guessing) could possibly give Ananda-Maya, or almost any other van Herpen, a fair crack at practical use as a fashion garment. An item of clothing, in other words. Bahahaha!! indeed.
Clockwise from main: Iris van Herpen with a dress from her 2016 collection in her Amsterdam atelier; a staff member works with laser cut fabric frames; the Ananda-Maya gown features in this yearās Triennial.Credit: New York Time, Iris van Herpen
On a video call with van Herpen, 39, from her Amsterdam atelier, she ranges across all the ways that mystifying fashions like hers and Schiaparelliās might be, if not understood, then at least accepted with less angst by mere mortals.
āEven if itās difficult for someone to consciously understand the concepts, even if theyāre not familiar with the inspirations behind it, and if they donāt know me, havenāt read a single interview about me, the [designs] are strong enough … that they can still feel and translate on an emotional level,ā she offers.
Van Herpenās pale face looms, appropriately ethereal as a Renaissance madonnaās, loosely framed by long unstyled hair, out of the fogged-out Zoom backdrop. Sheās soft-spoken, precise, quick to smile, immediately likeable.
We talk about open minds, gut feelings (the best tools to observe baffling fashions), and how marvellous it is when certain celebrities on red carpets and runways act as ābridgesā or āconduitsā between the aghast public and some of her wackiest (my word, not hers) iterations and out-there ideas.
āTheir braveness and energy brings my work to life,ā she says of Lady Gaga, Bjork, Zoe Kravitz, Janelle MonĆ”e and the many other ābraveā celebrities who have ignored the scoffers and trolls and agreed to be buckled, clamped, stitched, fused, heat-bonded or moulded into the latest van Herpen. Actress Gwendoline Christie, for example, (the towering Lady Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones), once described climbing into a van Herpen as ābeing bound up in the technology of what it is to be aliveā.
Van Herpen and I also talk about how, in woke-speak, exhibitions such as the Triennial can offer a āsafe spaceā for minds to open and gut feelings to blossom around weird-looking outfits. Which raises the mildly annoying question that journalists (not me) ask most often: āAre you an artist or a fashion designer?ā
āI would not know why you have to choose,ā she says. āIt can easily be both. In history it was common for an artist to be also, for example, a scientist, but nowadays people really want to understand which box you are in.ā
There is no box to house van Herpen. Up to 18 mind-blowing designs a season emerge from the all-engrossing collaborations she nurtures with physicists, biologists, academics, technicians, artists, architects, musicians, choreographers, filmmakers, milliners. She fuses couture craft with technologies, often in airy designs that are laboriously invented by trial and error, micro-success and micro-failure.
Iris van Herpen: āIām always looking for timelessness.ā³ā£Credit: Courtesy of the artist
She was the first designer to investigate 3D printing and hand-casting. She laser-cuts, blow-torches, shreds, fuses, moulds, and creates previously unthought-of materials. She experiments with electricity, sound, water, anti-matter, magnetic fields. Once, she and Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf shrink-wrapped models into clear plastic envelopes and suspended them from the ceiling. Post-show she was shrink-wrapped herself.
Van Herpenās designs invariably end up in museums and galleries more often than wardrobes. No surprise there. The point of their pointlessness as fashion designs is their payload of ideas, everything from cultural diversity to the knock-on effects of climate change, salty and snapping fresh from the zeitgeist.
āBut definitely my own personal zeitgeist,ā she corrects. Van Herpen is at pains to explain her criteria for new projects does not include the zeitgeistās blips, fads and flashes-in-the-pan. āIām always looking for timelessness. For example, a concept like aquatic architecture ā Iām interested in this now ā will be going through an evolution in the coming 50 years.ā
Arcing across all van Herpenās work is her constant experiment with fashionās core tenets, especially its traditional notions of femininity and beauty. āThe exploration of femininity is really key to everything I do,ā she says. Her designs are unarguably beautiful, but in unexpected ways. Ananda-Maya, for example, may be an exquisitely hand-crafted high-tech haute couture ode to experimental materials and the human struggle with self-realisation in a world of merging digital and physical identities (feel free to jot that down), but it is also gut-punchingly gorgeous.
So, gloriously stupid, or simply glorious? It depends which side of the fashion divide you land after looking closely and weighing all you now know about van Herpen with that tangle of psycho-social baggage mentioned earlier.
NGV fashion and textiles curator Katie Somerville equates van Herpen, Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli and other ābrave mindsā like theirs to fashionās equivalent of a research and development department.
āLike any field or industry, youāve got this laboratory of ideas,ā Somerville says. āItās those exciting, brave minds that want to explore things that havenāt been played with before.ā
She and co-curator in the NGVās fashion and textiles department, Danielle Whitfield, have clocked a combined 50 years acquiring these disruptive designs that ping in the zeitgeist, mark their moment in history and, one way or another, push fashionās slow, messy, back-and-forth process of evolution forward by a whisker or six.
āI guess itās almost instinctive,ā Somerville says of the complicated mechanics, ābut you do build up a visual bank [of fashion] in your head.ā
If youāre puzzled at this point by what exactly fashion evolution is, use the āpowdered wigā inquiry for enlightenment. Across centuries of (European) civilisation, how did we get from primitive skins, to medieval hopsack, to Rococo crinolines and powdered wigs, to modern micro-frocklets and jeansānāTs?
Chip, chip, chip is the answer. āThereāll be some element, some small gesture that people will absorb,ā says Somerville of the NGVās apparently baffling exhibits. āIt might be a colour palette, a material, accessories … but itās something theyāll feel comfortable adopting themselves when they feel creative.ā
The University of Melbourneās Lauren Rosewarne says āit could be feathers or certain printsā. āWithout fully understanding that that outfit, intact, is not actually ever going to be sold to you; it might take quite a while but bits of it, details, will end up at your local shopping centre.ā
And so fashion evolves: disruptors disrupt, hardened fashionistocrats, plucky celebrities and adventurous dressers snub the scoffers to adapt their designs and make them their own, a pall of public acceptance descends, more and more people wear the weird and, voila, ideas once considered gloriously stupid are slowly normalised. Just glorious.
The Triennial is at NGV International, December 3 to April 7, 2024. Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is at Brisbaneās QAGOMA from June 29 to October 7, 2024.
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