PARIS — The stuff of nightmares became a fashionista's dream Monday at Iris Van Herpen's debut collection on the haute couture calendar.
Seen as a platform for creativity — where work is counted in the hundreds of hours and costs are often simply not counted at all — couture is the laboratory where fashion tests its limits. No other designer on day one of the three-day-long couture calendar came anywhere near to pushing the envelope as far as Herpen.
With her fall-winter 2011-12 collection, the Dutch designer plumbed the depths of darkness, spinning it Rumpelstiltskin-style into the stuff of a rare and delicate beauty.
Abbreviated cocktail dresses sprouted an armor of Stegosaurus plates in clear plastic. A halterdress was made from what appeared to be a distended skeleton. Shiny black tubes completely enveloped another minidress, as if the model had been swallowed whole by a vacuum cleaner gone mad, or was being constricted by a luminous ebony boa.
A dress had an oversized skirt was made entirely out of twisted coils of metal wire. A plastic collar like a giant drop of water hitting a hard surface topped a tiny bustier dress made of leather laces.
The show — which channeled much of the dark creativity of the late Alexander McQueen, for whom Van Herpen once interned — was nothing short of a tour de force. Born in 1984 in Wamel, the Netherlands, she's among the youngest designers on the official couture calendar. Not to mention among the most promising.