Iris Van Herpen Fall 2023 Couture Introduces Aquatic Urbanism

Paris Couture Week is here, and Iris Van Herpen is capturing the fashion world’s attention with a legion of artful Fall 2023 creations inspired by “aquatic architecture” and “bionic innovations.” The couture collection, titled “Architectonics,” looks to a future of floating cities and pioneering design to craft an alternate uniform for humans that inhabit both land and sea.

Van Herpen’s vision board began with the philosophies of French architect and oceanographer Jacques Rougerie, whose research merges the worlds of scientific discovery and architectural innovation. Commonly referred to as the “Architect of the Sea,” Rougerie boasts a portfolio of underwater habitat designs and floating laboratories — both the types of locales where many of Van Herpen’s designs would ideally live and work about.

The designer’s looks fall under a new category called “aquatic urbanism.” Many of them appear to stylistically levitate, while others are more informed by gravity — but for all, there’s a sense of fluidity that underscores their construction. Adding to this otherworldly vision of style, Van Herpen enlisted future-minded label SCRY for a range of fanciful footwear that, again, appears adaptive to environments.

Alongside Rougerie’s breakthroughs, Van Herpen cites her sources in the world’s first floating city, “Oceanix,” which is presently under construction in South Korea. The waterborne destination, designed by starchitect Bjarke Ingels, will operate with circular, closed-loop water systems, offering coastal habitat regeneration.

In the collection, this mood board manifests through a series of dynamic pieces, many of which embrace vivid patterns that move in tandem with the human form. In an effort to “blur the boundary between fashion and floating architecture,” Van Herpen crafts new couture techniques to highlight the physiological, behavioral and structural adaptations of organisms via fashion.

Among them, the “Biophilic” technique includes laser-cutting bonded molds and injecting marble-textured silicone into fabrics to create an iridescent, shell-like appearance. Further, the “Oceanix” process sees graphic polygon patterns carefully explode while balancing atop fine fiberglass rods that distribute exact weights across the moving body; and the “Sensorama” technique includes waterjet-cutting and folding 0.7mm brass into 3D fractal mineral formations by hand.

Here, Iris Van Herpen remains a trailblazing visionary in couture, and her Fall 2023 collection is more than ready to dress humanity for a waterborne frontier in the future. See the collection in the gallery above.

Elsewhere, see Daniel Roseberry’s Schiaparelli Fall 2023 couture show.