Iris van Herpen

With her avant-garde and futuristic designs Iris has opened new fields in fashion for a few years now. With extraordinary creativity and craftsmanship she works on her collections. Her pieces aren’t really mass-produced articles or noticed for their functionality, but rather for their unique, qualitative and exceptionally remarkable appearance. Iris describes her work as fantasy pieces and definitely not supposed to be wearable.


Iris van Herpen graduated in 2006 from the ArtEZ Institute of Arts in Arnhem and proved herself as an eminently talented and promising woman. After her graduation she cultivated her skills under Viktor & Rolf and Alexander McQueen. Iris her designs are an innovative, futuristic and empowering cross over between art, design and fashion all with a little dramatic effect in them.

Her interest in fashion was triggered at an early age, sniffing around her grandmothers loft who had a big collection of clothes, costumes, shoes, handbags, wigs, masks, jewellery, hats, make-up; everything that you could imagine. It was at her grandmothers loft that she started to combine looks and later on it was a great place to take friends to and do photo shoots. On high school she was determined to go to an art academy, it was there that she found out fashion was the best medium to express her creativity.

Looking at Iris her designs you can easily see that her design take a lot of time and are very laborious. Making her designs is for Iris almost meditating, nice to know that in general she doesn’t see herself as a patient person. She hates to waste time, like waiting for a bus. “The only time I am patient, is when I make my designs. I come in another state of mind. It is only about my own world then, nothing else matters that much anymore.”

Her main design philosophy is re-evaluating reality, because the notion of reality is just as subjective as the notion of art. “The essence of all my designs is expressing the character of an unique woman and extend the shape of the feminine body in detail. I combine her femininity with performance and exclusivity.”

The latest collection of Iris is called “Crystallization” which she presented exclusive as a preview with ten of these designs at the Amsterdam International Fashion Week last July. She used a new technique to produce these designs. Now she is starting to develop this technique, rapid prototyping, further. She is broadening her horizon thinking about developing bags and accessories in the future and almost like faith tuned in she collaborated with United Nude on developing a shoe.


Article by Laura van Erkelens

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