When Iris Van Herpen presents her haute couture collection, titled Sympoiesis, at noon tomorrow in Paris, there will be any number of innovative materials in the show, including a diaphanous organza so light and ultra-fine that it weighs just five grams per square meter, hence its nickname “air fabric.”
The true pièce de résistance, however, will be a “living look” made from some 125 million bioluminescent algae. In the show’s darkened space, we will see one of Van Herpen’s recognizable patterns—at once skeletal and vegetal—giving off a vivid blue glow. Were we to look under a microscope, we would find a thriving colony of Pyrocystis lunula, single-cell microorganisms named after their moon-like shape.
For Van Herpen, who has generated designs from 3D-printing, created garments sensitive to magnetic fields, and conceived exoskeletons out of aluminum and carved wood, material experimentation is pretty much standard practice. But a look that is animate has even surpassed her own expectations as a kind of breakthrough symbiosis with another lifeform.
“It’s been one of the most extraordinary processes—well, actually, I can say it has been the most extraordinary,” she says. “Because it’s not like creating a look; it’s like cultivating, nurturing something you need to take care of. And then you bond with it, and this is really beautiful.”
As fittings were underway on Saturday, Van Herpen and her latest collaborator, Chris Bellamy, gave Vogue a preview of the creation. Like some kind of otherworldly specimen on display, the dress and legging ensemble hung inside a box carefully controlled with light—exactly the wavelength where the algae are found 50 meters below sea level—and humidity, with a cloud of cold steam pooling around the base.
In this daylight setting, the dimensional pattern was not illuminated, but milky white with a trace of blue; an imperfect comparison might be glow-in-the-dark stickers that have a greenish tinge. Like humans, pyrocystis lunula need ‘sleep’ and have their own light cycles like our Circadian rhythms. In the wild, they emit light in response to movement and/or when they sense predators. No word yet who Van Herpen is casting to wear the look or how the model will provoke the flash of light.
Yet with Van Herpen standing on one side of the box and Bellamy on the other, they explained how they first connected in February, some two years after Bellamy began his research in French Polynesia (he still travels there while also working in France, the UK and Amsterdam, where Van Herpen is based).
Once they agreed to advance on the project, Bellamy got to work on the algae farm—essentially a chamber of controlled light where the microorganisms grow in seawater, doubling in quantity every two weeks. After enough time, there was 20 liters of algae—a little more than a half-filled bathtub. Going from a liquid state to a solid that could be injected into Van Herpen’s custom molds involved transferring the algae to a seaweed nutrient gel—some 50 were tested to arrive at the right texture, color, and overall balance—and coating the forms with a protective membrane that’s breathable and allows them to live and glow. In total, this turned into a roughly 35-step process with support from the University of Amsterdam and the Francis Crick Institute for biomedical research. After significant trial and error, not to mention attaching the pattern to an illusion mesh second skin, they said they reached the successful outcome—“it worked,” said Bellamy—about a month ago.
The garments are now stored according to precisely controlled conditions that correspond to the algae’s native environment, such as temperature, light, humidity and rhythm. The organisms can continue to mate and reproduce inside the garment forms, making the dress brighter and brighter. As for an odor, Bellamy replies, “No, you can just smell the seawater.”
If this sounds more like something that belongs in a lab than on a runway, designers who work in the realm of haute couture have often compared the metier to their laboratory. In Van Herpen’s case, limitless interdisciplinary interests and research beyond the typical contours of wearable materials lead her to these visionary applications where science, technology, art, and fashion collide in some hybrid state.
“I think that’s the reason I am doing couture,” she says: “to evolve the whole language of craftmanship and to find its new shapes and forms in the time that we live in.”
For Bellamy, the process is actually not dissimilar from what’s happening with artificial intelligence, only that it represents a deeper understanding of nature. “Computer scientists are having to learn about complex systems that they don’t understand. Nature is a hugely complex system that we can’t really understand. So the mindset of thinking about nature and working with nature is the same mindset with AI… Part of this is understanding and part of it is saying, “I don’t know how it’s going to work. The whole atelier is about building relationships because we are not building a formula.”
Interestingly, the communication with bioluminescent algae is immediate. They can dim slightly when the conditions aren’t ideal—as in, last week’s European heatwave. “They develop a real personality and you build this connection to them.” What if they don’t like being on the runway? “They can last for two or three weeks on their own with no care, with no love, a bit like a pot plant,” Bellamy assures, extending the metaphor: “And we’re putting a pot plant in a space suit so we’re giving it a life support system through everything we are doing.”
As for the longer term, no one really knows what comes next, since the team considers this an ongoing experiment. But Bellamy says there are samples that have been living a year and “they’re very happy.” What happens when they die? He says there would be a slight color change.
Bellamy, who calls Van Herpen “the North Star of design and nature,” studied Biodesign at Central Saint Martins and then became an engineer working with electric cars and recyclable shoes until he had a change of heart. “I realized that the world didn’t need more stuff and that plastics and metals wouldn’t meet the Paris Climate Agreement.” He set off for the Pacific Islands and worked with an indigenous cultural educator on a luminescent swimsuit in symbiosis with nature.
“For me to study arts was really important because the arts look at the emotional side of things, and it’s through emotion that you can try to change human behavior. And then working with living things, this state of livingness, we don’t really appreciate this, but humans could never create anything as remarkable as a tree—it’s far more advanced than we possibly know.”
This brings us back to the show’s title, Sympoiesis, a neologism formed from the Greek “sym” (together) and “poiesis” (making or producing) to describe ecological systems that evolve through interactions. Here, we are seeing what happens when a couture designer has transcended human collaborative processes to encompass the complexities of microorganisms. Sure, the illuminated effect will be cool; but its living state is what speaks to Van Herpen’s macro intention.
“It’s like a metaphor because we need to keep the earth alive to survive and we have to protect it. This is what the collection is really about—taking care of what gives us life, because the ocean is the largest ecosystem on the planet.”