Iris van Herpen’s most difficult dress | Virtual Design Festival | Dezeen

In the last of our three exclusive video interviews for Virtual Design Festival, Iris van Herpen describes how she created the optical illusions in her Hypnosis collection, which includes a dress the Dutch fashion designer describes as her most complicated yet. Van Herpen is known for her elaborate haute couture fashion. For her Fall 2019 Hypnosis collection, presented at Élysée Montmatre in Paris during the city’s fashion week, she produced dresses made from tens of thousands of rippling pieces of fabric, each cut to just 0.8 millimetres wide. “What I hoped is that you really couldn’t see where the garment begins and where the skin ends,“ she said in the video. Van Herpen describes the collection, which she developed together with architect and long-time collaborator Philip Beesley, as a series of optical illusions. “The patterns are cut so finely that it moves faster than your eye can follow,“ she said. “So it has a really delicate inter