Van Herpen’s inspiration moved between astrophysics and the experiments of Victorian artist and inventor Margaret Watts Hughes, whose Eidophone transformed the vibrations of her singing voice into intricate patterns of powder. Separated by more than a century, starquakes and Hughes’s sonic geometries shared a central idea: invisible forces can leave physical traces. On the runway, those traces appeared as spiralling embroideries, branching surfaces and dresses that seemed shaped by currents rather than seams.
The opening pearl-encrusted look made that connection immediately. Thousands of luminous spheres followed sinuous paths across illusion tulle, revealing and concealing the body like a constellation observed through mist. Above it, a sculptural headpiece curled around the face in a glistening orbit. Van Herpen’s familiar tension between exposure and protection remained, but here it felt newly celestial, the wearer suspended somewhere between organism and astronomical event.
Transparency became a form of architecture. One nude bodysuit was surrounded by enormous loops of translucent organza, caught in motion around the body like magnetic fields made visible. Another look, rendered in shifting turquoise and cobalt, layered fine panels into topographic contours that resembled waves, mineral formations and planetary maps all at once. The garment did not simply follow the figure; it appeared to create an atmosphere around it.
Technology, as ever, was not presented as spectacle for its own sake. The Helix Nebula dress incorporated two hand-blown glass forms infused with plasma and surrounded by 10,000 graduated glass spheres attached to illusion tulle. When touched, the wearer’s body became part of the plasma’s electrical field, allowing garment and human conductor to interact. Van Herpen described the experiment as a step toward couture made from energy itself, the fourth state of matter entering her vocabulary after solids, liquids, living materials and gas.
The collection’s most radical experiment, however, was the Fractal Universe look. Charged inside a particle accelerator and cryogenically preserved, the dress became a reservoir of trapped electrons. Van Herpen initially intended for the energy to discharge on the runway, but the garment began releasing it beforehand, etching branching channels through its structure. Rather than correcting the result, she accepted the loss of control: an invisible natural force had completed the dress.
That surrender was echoed throughout the silhouettes. Laser-cut velvet divided the body with liquid, flame-like shapes that continued across exposed skin in trompe-l’œil embroidery. A cobalt velvet gown, half-covered by organic cut-outs and extended into a long cape, appeared to dissolve from flesh into fabric. Its accompanying mask erased the face almost completely, turning the model into an anonymous cosmic figure. Elsewhere, black reflective surfaces curved around the shoulders like polished fragments of another planet, while a severe black column was interrupted by nude, branching motifs and a metallic frame positioned over the eyes.
With Sonic Starquakes, Iris van Herpen did not attempt to explain the universe so much as mirror its unknowability. Her couture has always occupied the space between scientific inquiry and fantasy, but this season that relationship became more intimate. The body was no longer merely dressed in representations of cosmic energy. It became part of the system itself, conducting, vibrating and briefly taking shape before dissolving again.