Science on the catwalk: Iris van Herpen gives gowns a glow up

Sculpting the unseen

Her curiosity penetrates to the quantum level. In 2014, as a guest artist at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, she and her long-time collaborator, Canadian architect Philip Beesley, fell into conversation with theoretical physicist Subodh Patil. Patil has since moved to Leiden University in the Netherlands and has shifted focus, but, at the time, he was wrestling with the question of what happened before the Big Bang — the point at which, from the perspective of the present, space-time collapses.

“What would that look like?” Patil recalls his visitors asking. He replied that words and even mathematics had so far failed to describe it. He himself had trouble visualizing the “frothy magma” of quantum foam — the minuscule fluctuations of space and time that are thought to have seeded the Big Bang. When, a few years later, he spotted a dress from van Herpen’s Aeriform collection, in which matter seemed to dissolve into haloes of energy, he felt “a ping of joy”. Van Herpen had come up with a visual metaphor for quantum foam that he recognized. He discovered only then that the dress had been inspired by their conversation.

Van Herpen returns to CERN often. Perhaps because she’s driven to sculpt the invisible, she feels at home at the Large Hadron Collider, the vast loop of superconducting magnets that accelerates particles until they collide, recreating the conditions of the early Universe. After her first visit, she and fellow Dutch designer Jólan van der Wiel started using magnetism as a design tool, growing dresses from a material containing iron filings. She often uses optical illusion — in her collection Between the Lines, for instance — and finds untapped realms of possibility in the unseen. “My ideal material would be a tiny flat device, powered by nanotechnology, that conjured 3D holograms without a screen,” she says.