Bringing a tangibility to spaces distanced from common understanding, the emergence of new digital worlds is opening the fashion-scape to possibilities in which physicality is secondary. Yet, as one of fashion’s true innovators, Dutch designer Iris Van Herpen has been augmenting design practices that foreshadowed these developments for nearly two decades, experimenting with 3D printing, and technologies that blur human skill with digital advancement, while creating otherworldly immersive landscapes through the runway spectacles used to showcase them.

Stretching the ever-expanding capabilities of digital fashion through virtual and augmented reality, filmmaker Tim Richardson weaves Van Herpen’s future vision and technical innovation into a magnificent digital realm with short film, Neon Rapture. Exploring the pioneering creative’s oeuvre as the inspiration for a new universe, the two artists envisage a portal into a haute couture odyssey, materialized as a completely digital reality. Made with Academy Award winning VFX company, The Mill, and the help of an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games, Neon Rapture is the beginning of the two artists' collaboration – and the first appearance of the film’s hyperreal digital muse, 0MN1A.

The culmination of two years of work, and featuring the latest in motion capture and virtual human technology, Neon Rapture realizes Richardson’s ambition to create a new level of cinematic photorealism in digital fashion, embodied by the muse, 0MN1A. Working from the original pattern for the finale look from Van Herpen’s Spring/Summer 2021 ‘Roots of Rebirth’ show, the film sees the piece reconstructed as the first genuinely digital couture garment, painstakingly remade by applying real world principles within the digital realm. In a scale reproduction, rendered with immaculate photoreal precision, Van Herpen’s signature laser cut finishing and embroidery form the epicenter of a digital landscape – in which the designer’s future-led experimentation, and Richardson’s directorial vision give birth to a new form at the nexus point between technology and the human experience. 

What initially drove you to push into unexplored territories in fashion?

Iris Van Herpen: I’m fascinated by everything around me, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. The layers of life around us we cannot see, they’re experienced in different ways. Art, science and fashion can widen our experiences and perspectives – to embrace fashion’s interconnectedness to science, philosophy, and art, reshape reality, and understand that fashion is so much more than an outer layer. It’s our personal canvas to express our identities, our cultures, our beliefs, our history, and our present.

What would you say most inspires you from a visual perspective?

Nature is a force of inspiration that is incomparable to any other sources. The more I create, the more I feel connected with nature, and the more I feel connected with nature, the more I'm inspired to create. Through biomimicry, I like to look at and learn from all the forces behind the forms in nature – these endless mysteries are a huge influence on my work.

You’ve referenced motion as an influence - does this play into your use of digital technologies?

My obsession with movement and transformation is the main reason I experiment with new technologies. These experiments lead to new forms of movement, and a new sensuality – a feminine sensuality that is defined with fluidity and organicness.

To transform fabrics and other materials seamlessly to the body, while creating fluid movements in the organic structures and textures, I need to combine high-tech techniques with traditional Haute Couture craftsmanship. The symbiosis between the original and new techniques is giving me the most freedom in perfectionating the movements of the materials.

How does your ballet training inform your designs and the performance element of your shows?

Dance, like fashion, is such a personal expression – it’s literally a transformation of the body. And that’s what I want to capture in the designs. I’m not only looking at the body, I look at the space around the body, like a dancer would. It’s sort of translating a piece of dance into a garment.

Through my ballet background, I learned a lot about the endless shape-making that we can create with our bodies, and learned about the power of performance. This has seeped into my creative process, where the body is my canvas, and its malleability, a means to create dialogue. Garments that extend from the human body, sculpting its form into new silhouettes from the outside, can leave an imprint on our inner world. When I design, I think of the body as a sculpture, and the women I design for as a living piece of art. My shows embody and embrace this; fashion, art, performance, and innovation are all merged into one experience.  

From your perspective, what opportunities do VR and AR open up in fashion?

Through AR and VR, people will experience fashion like a multiverse – multiple realities can apply at the same time. Wearing a garment will become a story of discovery through time, like music, and fashion shows will become interactive, more like a game. I envision the shows can become a synaesthetic experience – when your senses are mixed, you can feel sounds, or taste colors. I have a bit of synaesthesia as when I hear beautiful music, I start seeing patterns. This multi-sensorial experience is what I hope people can share in the future through mixed reality experiences. Twelve years ago, I made my Synesthesia collection, dreaming of shifting the public’s sensorial reality. VR and AR experiences, in more advanced headsets than we have today, might make this possible.

How have new digital technologies expanded your concepts?

Books and films, from science fiction to documentaries, and scientific research have influenced and inspired my imagination and concepts from the early years till now. The digital evolution, from artificial intelligence to the metaverse, is conceptualized in different forms throughout my collections. Some of my collections conceptualized most strongly around digital evolution are 'Hybrid Holism’, 'Meta Morphism', ‘Biopiracy’, 'Hacking Infinity’ and 'Magnetic Motion’.

Which elements of your design work would be entirely impossible without digital technologies?

All the 3D printing, 3D molding, and laser cutting would not be possible without digital technologies. Interestingly, I do believe that my design DNA would still be similar, and would still have this organicness, three-dimensionality and softness if I was born some decades earlier. I would design with the same soul, just a different set of tools.

Are there advanced elements of your work that are now achievable through tech, but which you continue to do by hand?

We wouldn’t be able to integrate new techniques, like 3D printing, injection molding, laser cutting, without the knowledge we have from traditional craftsmanship. A lot of the process phases of these new technologies involve traditional techniques. They are both, literally, interwoven into each other. It also works the other way around, when exploring a new technique and the process of learning inspires me to look at traditional craft in a different way.

In the beginning, some of these techniques were so new that I separated the two worlds, because I needed to work with architects or biologists to guide the process. I would develop a dress outside of the atelier with architect Philip Beesley, and I would be doing the hand-work here in the atelier. Quite organically, I started to create a language with the people I was collaborating with, and integrated that part into the process we were doing here. If I look at the looks we make today, I can’t separate the new techniques from the old techniques clearly anymore. They’re all so mixed. Some dresses, for example, start off with a mold from 3D printing, and then we do a hand-work technique on top of it.