Iris van Herpen ~ Sympoiesis

A sense of urgency laps at every facet of Sympoiesis, the new collection presented by Iris van Herpen at Paris Haute Couture Week on July 7, 2025. For nearly two decades, the couturier has worked in communion with the primordial rhythm of the organic and the human imperative of the technological. Within Sympoiesis manifests the growing fragility of their interdependence. To navigate the fracturing symbiosis, Van Herpen turns to the expansive, life-giving force of the ocean as a conceptual gateway, bearing witness to its ecological transformation and transcribing it into cloth via translucently layered textures, liquidised forms, and silhouettes that surge and wane as the tide. Guided by James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, the designer examines the ocean not as a singular ecosystem but as part of a wider biospheric consciousness. “The collection explores how we are one with the ocean, the largest and most important ecosystem on our planet that generates more than half of the oxygen we breathe. “ Seeking to convey not only the ocean’s state of peril but its innate beauty in the collection too, Van Herpen draws upon the freeform movement of Loie Fuller to embody the full spectrum of its forms, from its wild tidal power to its amorphous organisms. The pioneering muse and dancer, who van Herpen has long been inspired by as a trained dancer herself, embraced the unpredictability of fabric in motion, shrouding herself in silk and using bamboo wands to expand the improvised phantasmal sh