PARIS — Iris van Herpen is a Dutch designer whose otherworldly fashion creations utilize technology to an extent seldom seen outside of a laboratory.
For her latest couture collection, “Shift Souls,” unveiled in Paris this week, influences included the “Harmonia Macrocosmica,” a 17th-century star atlas, the fluidity of identity change and the possibility of engineered human hybrids, all finding form in floating organza gowns with swirling gaseous-like prints.
Then there were the shoes.
Made from soft leather pieces, one of which wrapped around the wearer’s ankle, each pair had transparent plexiglass heels. Blocks of the material were infused with two colors of ink, which took four days to distill into molten colored clouds; then, the heels were carved by hand into undulating curves.
Unlike some of Ms. van Herpen’s previous footwear creations, often wedges that teetered on the fringes of fantasy to the point of impracticality, these shoes combined a strange beauty with a sturdy commercial clout.
Indeed, you know a designer is on to something when it’s the shoes you remember from a runway finale. Amid a swirling black and blue laser beam projection, precise lines of light traced through the vapors along the soles and heels of the shoes to create a glow-in-the-dark effect.
Even for Ms. van Herpen, who found fame in 2010 when she introduced a collection that made use of 3-D printing (the first ever), it felt like a step up.
