Fashion designer Iris van Herpen, who previously showcased 3D-printed dresses to Paris Fashion Week, has created Wilderness Embodied a series of dresses “grown” from magnets. A collaboration with product designer Jolan Van Der Wiel, the dresses were made by adding a mixture of iron filings and resin to fabric before using magnets to pull the garments into different shapes. “I was interested in making invisible forces visible,” Van Der Wiel tells Fast Company. Each dress from the collection took three weeks to form.
Iron woman: dresses ‘grown’ from metal and magnets
The result of the pair’s work is a striking collection; a kind of industrial-organic crossover. Fabric that, instead of flowing, is a snapshot of a single moment. “Nature is wild,” explains van Herpen’s description of the collection, adding that the dresses’ are formed “by the phenomenon of attraction and repulsion.” van Herpen cites the “forces of nature” as the driving force behind the project, noting that she sought to reveal the “wild(er)ness of the human body through the garments.
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