Photo Credits: Daniele Oberrauch/ Go Runway
At the quiet threshold between biology and art, Iris van Herpen opens Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2025 with Sympoiesis a collection that doesn’t merely dress the body, but communes with life itself. In this vision, couture ceases to be a static sculpture. It becomes an organism.
Credits: IKris Van Herpen/ Instagram
The show opens with a dress not designed, but cultivated. A first in the history of fashion: a living garment inhabited by 125 million bioluminescent algae, born in seawater and sustained within a translucent, breathable membrane. Developed in collaboration with biodesigner Chris Bellamy, the piece glows not from embellishment, but from the circadian rhythm of the life forms it houses. It is, in every sense, alive.
Photo Credits: Photo Credits: Daniele Oberrauch/ Go Runway
And so Van Herpen reframes the runway as a sanctuary. Not a place of spectacle, but a space of care. Sympoiesis proposes a radical inversion: fashion as a host, couture as a caretaker. The garment becomes a site of symbiosis, echoing marine intelligence and fragility, where light is not cast on the model, but emerges from her.
There is an almost devotional quality to this act of creation. Not built, but nurtured; not fabricated, but fostered. In a time when speed dominates all aspects of culture, Van Herpen offers a profound resistance: the gesture of patience. The dress was grown over weeks. Its choreography rehearsed not just by human body, but by organismic rhythm. This is not fashion as object it is fashion as ecology.
Photo Credits: Photo Credits: Daniele Oberrauch/ Go Runway
Sympoiesis isn’t a metaphor. It is a proposal. A manifesto for a new era in couture where garments breathe, react, and evolve. Where the boundaries between wearer and world dissolve into mutual becoming. Where fashion is no longer the last layer we wear, but the first layer we protect.
Photo Credits: Photo Credits: Daniele Oberrauch/ Go Runway
In this luminous new chapter, Van Herpen doesn’t simply present a collection. She opens a portal. One that beckons us toward a slower, more attuned future where beauty is measured not in ornament, but in our capacity to listen, to hold, and to care.
