Iris van Herpen crafts "dissolving" Met Gala dress from 15,000 glass bubbles
Fashion designer Iris van Herpen has created a metamorphic dress covered in thousands of iridescent glass spheres that appear to gradually disintegrate for Olympian Eileen Gu, who debuted the garment at last night's Met Gala in New York City.
Known for her intricate haute couture garments brought to life by technology, Dutch creative Van Herpen worked with Tokyo-London studio AA Murakami to conceive the Airo dress out of 15,000 bubble-like glass spheres.
Eileen Gu debuted the Airo dress at the Met Gala
Worn by Chinese-American athlete Gu, the garment was fitted with hidden microprocessors under its skirt that emitted real bubbles on the red carpet at last night's Met Gala fundraiser, which takes place every year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The design team programmed the microprocessors to coordinate the release of pressured gas so that the dress appeared to be "dissolving into air".
Sequenced through a dedicated digital interface within the dress, the microprocessors were calibrated to operate autonomously and silently during the event to enhance the effect.
Airo was brought to life across 2,550 hours and 15 weeks by a team of experts from the worlds of couture, science and computational design.
The garment is characterised by a fitted, mini-dress silhouette. Each glass bubble was bonded in place on the dress using UV light, which acts as a powerful adhesive.
Van Herpen and AA Murakami designed the sculptural garment to respond to this year's Met Gala theme of "fashion is art" and sought to echo Gu's "airborne grace on the slopes" as a freestyle skier.
"Reflecting the atomic anatomy of the human body – composed of 99.9 per cent empty space – floating iridescent bubbles reveal the body not as solid, but as a dynamic field of matter and energy," said Van Herpen.
"[The dress] expresses the body as transient, fluid, and always in flux," she added.
Last year, Van Herpen worked with biodesigner Chris Bellamy to create a "first-of-its-kind living look", a dress made from 125 million bioluminescent algae that emit light as it moves.
The fashion designer also spoke to Dezeen about her boundary-pushing approach to garment-making in this interview.
The photography is courtesy of Iris van Herpen.
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