Atlanta High Museum Honors Haute Couture and 3D-Printed Fashion

Founded in 1905 and once housed in a majestic estate with a long and colorful history, Atlanta Georgia's High Museum of Art has become the leading art museum in the southeastern United States. Dedicated to supporting and collecting works by southern artists, the museum boasts more than 15,000 works of art in its permanent collection and is renowned for its classic and contemporary art exhibits and award-winning architecture.

Atlanta High Museum
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The High Museum and Haute Couture

The museum has stepped out of its comfort zone  and has entered the world of haute couture with its latest exhibit, Iris Van Herpen: Transforming Fashion, that is focused entirely on fashion and the works of an internationally acclaimed Dutch designer whose bold, visionary works meld science and technology, and push fashion beyond conventional boundaries.

iris Van Herpen
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This exhibit marks Van Herpen's evolution beyond the world of traditional artistry via selections from collections dating from 2008 through 2015. According to Sarah Schieuning, themueum's curator of decorative arts and design: "We are exploring the broad idea of what is art and design and her work is the alchemy of artistry."

Who is iris Van Herpen?

Born in 1984, Iris Van Herpen began her own fashion label back in 2997. She studied Fashion Design at the Artez Institute of the Arts Arnheim and interned in London at Alexander McQueen and Claudy Jongstra in Amsterdam. Her exclusive designs are dark and fantastic and she is considered a pioneer in fashion. She earns this distinction both because of her exploration of 'unexpected' fabrics and materials created by blending steel with silk and iron fillings with resin, and her early adoption of 3-D technologies. Her 2010 Crystallization collection presented the world's first 3-d printed dress in a runway show.

Crystallization Collection
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The Transforming Fashion Exhibit

The exhibit showcases 40 of her exclusive sculptral outfits from 15 different collections, all of which employ one-of-a-kind materials: the metal ribs of an umbrella are transformed into bird-like structures; industrial mesh suggests billowing smoke and iron filings aided by the power of  magnetic fields appear to grow into clothing. Other acquisitions for the exhibit include: the Ice Dress from her Magnetic Motion Line which appears to be molded onto the skin and a  3-D printed dress from her Hybrid Holism collection replicating digital leaf formations.

The Ice Dress
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 Iris Van Herpen and the future of fashion

Iris Van Herpen works at the crossroads of fashion, design and science. Her tremendous creative energy and daring vision are aligned with the dynamic and capricious nature of the fashion industry, which is always about devouring and then quickly forgetting about the 'next new thing.' She fearlessly pushes envelopes and boundaries with her novel ideas and creations and redefines the meaning of  artistry with everything she makes.

In what ways does artistic expression reflect the attitudes of the world?

Closing thoughts on creativity:

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. ~ Edwin Land