Who is the designer when the garment is code?
In 2020, Iris van Herpen's Sensory Seas convinced me fashion still had a future. Six years later, she has made a dress that is alive. Technology hasn't replaced the craftsman. It has moved her.
Courtesy of Iris van Herpen.
january 2020 → 2026
"I am truly in awe of yesterday's Iris van Herpen couture collection, Sensory Seas."
I wrote that the day after the show in Paris in January 2020, calling it one of the best I had seen in a long time. Six years on, I'd go further: she is the only designer at the moment who actually excites me about fashion and the future of the industry. But rereading it now, the more interesting question isn't whether her work is beautiful. It's what her work does to the idea of a designer.
Technology does not eliminate craftsmanship. It relocates it, changing what designers need to know and what creative authorship means.
A nervous system, drawn in water
The first thread came from Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish neuroanatomist whose drawings of the nervous system are counted among the greatest scientific illustrations ever made. Hunched over his microscope, he merged science with art and made our own wiring visible.
The second came from the deep: Hydrozoa, delicately branched sea organisms that shift between a polyp stage and a medusa stage. They embroider the ocean like aqueous fabric, forming layers of living lace.
Van Herpen set the two side by side, dendrite against coral, synapse against sea. The result was 21 silhouettes in deep-sea aquarelles of clouded blues, lilacs, soft ochres and coral reds. The models emerged from Paul Friedlander's lightwave sculptures, ribbons of light that seemed to swim.
Courtesy of Iris van Herpen.
Laser-cut silk dendrites heat-bonded to black glass organza, then hand-embroidered onto laser-cut pearlescent exoskeletons.
laserhandWhite silicone thread 3D-printed directly onto black silk chiffon, so the print becomes part of the fabric.
3D printOil-painted, layered, laser-cut PetG bubbles with digitally printed, heat-bonded glass-organza halos.
laserpaintedThousands of layers of white screen-printing mesh, cut and hand-embellished with chevron grids, developed with architect Philip Beesley.
cuthand
"You absolutely cannot create water with a needle."
Iris van Herpen, to System magazineCraft didn't disappear
Look at that list of techniques again. Every one of them is part machine, part hand. A laser cuts the dendrites; a person embroiders them. A printer lays down silicone; a person decides where the line should break. Even the colour began by hand: artist Shelee Carruthers painted the greens, blues and ochres.
Van Herpen has said she turned to technology because she "had ideas that I couldn't really produce by hand." That's the honest version of the story. Not a machine replacing a seamstress, but a designer whose imagination outran the needle, and who then had to learn software, material science and engineering to catch up with it.
So the craft moved: from the fingertips into the file, the material test, the collaboration with an architect or a biologist. And then, crucially, back into the hands that finish the garment. Authorship didn't dissolve. It spread across a team, and the designer's job became deciding what all of it is for.
Designing structures that interact with the body
Conventional garment construction starts with flat cloth and cuts it to fit a body. Digital fabrication can start with the body's contours and movement and build outward. That's why 3D printing matters in fashion: not because it's new, but because it lets a dress behave like an exoskeleton, a shell or a wave. The next frontier may be less about dressing the body than designing structures that respond to it.
It also isn't a sudden revolution. Van Herpen has been experimenting with it for more than fifteen years.
Cultivated, not constructed
If Sensory Seas drew the nervous system, Sympoiesis, shown in Paris in July 2025, went further: it put something alive on the runway. Made with biodesigner Chris Bellamy, the "living look" holds 125 million bioluminescent algae that glow when they move. On Stella Maxwell, each step made the dress pulse electric blue.
"This collection is a collaboration with nature itself," van Herpen said. The rest of the show backed that up: a coral-reef dress laser-cut from Spiber's Brewed Protein, a fermented and biodegradable fibre; jellyfish-like dresses inspired by Turritopsis dohrnii, the "immortal" jellyfish; and a skeletal dress made with artist Casey Curran.
bioluminescent Pyrocystis lunula algae in a single dress
of growth in seawater baths before they were set in a nutrient gel and moulded into a protective membrane
between shows it rests in a chamber tuned to the ocean's humidity, temperature and daylight rhythms
Here the question in my title gets genuinely strange. Who designed this dress: van Herpen, the biodesigner who grew it, or the algae that decide when and how brightly it glows? The honest answer is all three. Couture has always been collaborative. This just makes the collaboration impossible to hide.
A living dress is a powerful image for ocean conservation. But it needs a climate-controlled chamber to survive. Before calling biodesign sustainable, ask about the energy, lifespan and end of life of the actual object, not just the story it tells.
Three others asking the same question
An architect who co-created 3D-printed pieces with van Herpen, including Hybrid Holism, and Queen Ramonda's 3D-printed crown for Black Panther. Her work shows that digital fabrication is also a change in how designers think.
Known for computational design, including the articulated 3D-printed gown he engineered with Michael Schmidt for Dita Von Teese in 2013. His practice asks what's left for the designer when software generates the pattern.
Works where fashion meets robotics and sensors. Her Spider Dress extends its mechanical limbs when someone gets too close: clothing as an extension of the nervous system, which brings us right back to Cajal.
Three words to test, not repeat
Fashion technology arrives wrapped in press-release vocabulary. Three words deserve to be checked against outcomes every time.
What was actually printed, and what was assembled by hand? A 3D-printed accessory under a hand-embroidered gown is a different claim from a fully printed garment.
Material sourcing, energy, waste, repairability and end of life. A biodegradable fibre is a start, not a verdict.
Digital files can travel anywhere. Couture does not. Who can actually wear, make or afford this, and when?
If fashion is no longer defined by its materials and techniques, what defines it next?
My answer: the decision. Code can generate a thousand forms and algae can light them, but someone still has to choose which one is worth wearing, and why. That choice is where the designer lives now. Van Herpen is still the designer who excites me most, not because of the technology, but because she never lets it make the choice for her.
+ Sensory Seas show credits (2020)
- Lightwave sculptures: Paul Friedlander
- Collaborating artists: Philip Beesley, Shelee Carruthers, Duke Morse, Perry Hall
- Styling: Patti Wilson · Casting: Maida Gregori Boina, Maxime Valentini, CM Casting
- Show production: SixUp Paris · Press: N6, Alexandre Malgouyres, KCD Worldwide
- Music direction: Salvador Breed, including Joep Beving & Maarten Vos, "Apophis" (Deutsche Grammophon), and Kuedo, "Bend Moon" (Planet Mu)
- Light design: Stefan Prokop · Choreography: @diekidiek
- Make-up: Chiao-Li Hsu for MAC · Hair: Martin Cullen, Björn Axen
- Photography: Gio Staiano, Alepix · Video: Blitzkickers
What was Iris van Herpen's Sensory Seas collection?
Her Spring/Summer 2020 haute couture collection of 21 silhouettes, inspired by Ramón y Cajal's drawings of the nervous system and by Hydrozoa, branched sea organisms that form layers of "living lace." It combined laser-cut silk, 3D-printed silicone thread, hand embroidery and light sculptures by Paul Friedlander.
What is Iris van Herpen's living dress?
A look from her Sympoiesis collection (AW25–26), made with biodesigner Chris Bellamy. It holds 125 million bioluminescent algae that glow in response to movement and touch, and is described as cultivated rather than constructed.
Does 3D printing replace craftsmanship in fashion?
Not in practice. Van Herpen's collections combine digital fabrication with extensive handwork such as embroidery, heat-bonding and hand embellishment. Technology relocates craftsmanship rather than removing the hand.
Who else works with 3D printing in fashion?
Julia Koerner, Francis Bitonti and Anouk Wipprecht are three of the best known, working across architecture, computational design and robotics.
Images: Iris van Herpen, Sensory Seas, SS20 haute couture, courtesy of Iris van Herpen. Original post: Leila Antakly, January 2020. Revisited for Antakly Projects, 2026.
