2026
Last year Iris Van Herpen sent dresses down the runway that were alive, gowns pulsing with millions of bioluminescent algae that had to be tended like houseplants. And the only way to top living couture, it turns out, was to leave Earth entirely! Her Fall 2026 collection, “Sonic Starquakes,” begins with the fact that stars are not silent: pressure waves ripple through their plasma depths the way earthquakes shudder through stone, and each star sounds its own note, the giants droning low like tubas and double basses, the small ones piping in thin celestial flutes.
Van Herpen translated that unheard music into cloth. Tens of thousands of hand-blown glass spheres, graduated in size from seed pearl to soap bubble, float on illusion tulle so the body seems to dissolve into a fizz of light at its edges. Hand-pleated chiffons sweep into half-wheels suspended within moon-curved carbon fiber boning, drifting as if moved by an unseen current. Laser-cut velvets undulate down the body in dark vertical rivulets past the hem of the fabric onto bare skin in hand embroidery, so that garment and wearer blur at the border. The palette descends through the night sky: midnight black into sapphire, cobalt into moonstone green, nebula red, storm-lit silver, all of it unspooling across the Élysée Montmartre over a floor boiling with dry ice.
The showpieces, though, weren’t merely inspired by science; they were made of it. The Helix Nebula dress carries two crescent lunar forms of hand-blown glass arching from the shoulder, each one filled with actual plasma, the luminous fourth state of matter, a charged cloud of ions and free electrons that constitutes more than 99% of the visible universe and, until this month, zero percent of haute couture.
Its deep red glow is the light of electrons leaping between energy levels, the same physics that paints the auroras and ignites the nebulae where stars are born. Bring a hand near the glass and the filaments inside bend toward it; worn, the dress draws the body into its electrical field, wearer and gown briefly sharing a single electromagnetic system. And then, the Fractal Universe look, a molded glass-like minidress charged inside a particle accelerator and kept cryogenically preserved at minus 100 degrees Celsius before the show, a garment holding billions of trapped electrons in suspension, a wearable reservoir of storm.
The plan was to discharge it dramatically on the runway. Instead, before the show, the captive electricity found its own way out: branching Lichtenberg figures erupted across the surface, lightning fossilized mid-strike, fractal channels burned permanently into the material. Van Herpen has been seeing those fern-like patterns everywhere since, river deltas, root systems, the veins branching beneath the wrist. I saw all of it through a screen, thousands of miles away, and the hairs on the back of my neck rose anyway. Electrical fields, spooky action at a distance, awe and shiver arriving across an impossible divide.
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