From November 29, 2023 to April 28, 2024, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs pays tribute to Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, now recognized as one of the most avant-garde figures of her generation. Organized as an immersive and sensory exploration into the designer’s universe, this retrospective merging fashion, contemporary art, design and science, revolves around eight themes that identify the very essence of van Herpen’s body of work.”
Kim Keever collaborated with world-renowned designer Iris van Herpen to create three couture looks in her Spring 2019 collection, Shift Souls. Now a retrospective exhibition, Fashioning the Future, will feature Kim Keever’s artwork in Rooms 11-12 - Voyage Cosmique.'
Excerpt from Vogue, January 21, 2019:
“Van Herpen is a voracious researcher who finds her message at the nexus of historical, scientific, artistic, and futuristic references. She would not have introduced color for color’s sake. Backstage, she cited inspirations that spanned the Harmonia Macrocosmica (a 17th-century star atlas) to the possibility of engineered human hybrids. Cut to the 3-D-printed face-contouring jewelry, the cloud-like dresses in translucent organza (a collaboration with New York–based artist and former NASA engineer Kim Keever), and the dress with “anamorphic faces” embedded into undulating layers of white silk outlined in black. There was something Picasso-esque to the way the eyes moved as the model walked—a surrealist flourish within a graceful creation. The two final looks followed a similar construction, except that the petal-like projections now appeared to be emerging from the body, not just covering it. And in warm bursts of color, the modified anatomies that remain a fascination for Van Herpen were no longer so severe.”
Musée des Arts Décoratifs
107 Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France
Header Image: Karen Elson photographed by Luigi and Iango for Iris van Herpen, featuring a dress with a design by Kim Keever.
Second Image: Look 14 from the 'Shift Souls' 2019 runway collection, courtesy of Vogue.