Iris Van Herpen Fall 2026 Couture

Iris Van Herpen returned to the runway this season shortly after her landmark exhibition landed in Brooklyn. Read on for our Iris Van Herpen Fall 2026 Couture review.

Iris Van Herpen filled Élysée Montmartre with smoke and set the scene for her fall 2026 show via her signature flowing fabrics, iridescent ethereal gowns and oceanic dresses. The show notes mentioned sonic vibrating stars, exploding supernovae, the spiraling geometries of galaxies, and the turbulence of plasma as key inspirations. As a whole, the show very much resembled Iris Van Herpen’s core aesthetic: otherworldly, angelic, alien and provocative. Of course, it wouldn’t be an Iris Van Herpen show without some display of technology, and this time guests were treated to a light-up dresses that were way more than meets the eyes. These two showpieces were brilliant examples of what’s possible when you push the boundaries of fashion with science and technology.

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Enter the Nebula dress: embellished with two lunar-like forms of hand-blown glass, sculpted so they seem to float, each one filled with plasma that flickers and shifts the moment a hand comes near. It’s without a doubt, the kind of piece that makes you do a double take. Is it fashion, is it science, is it art? (The answer, of course, is all three.) The dress is made of floating lunar forms of hand-blown glass infused with plasma, surrounded by some 10,000 hand-blown glass spheres; each one graduating in size, fused to whisper-thin illusion tulle with UV light, so the weightless effect is unreal. But the real magic happens when the dress is worn. The body becomes a conductor, slipping into the plasma’s electrical field and bending it in real time. For a moment, wearer and dress share one electromagnetic system. Iris Van Herpen always goes deep with the details here and even the color has a gloriously fabulous story: the deep, nebula-red glow comes from electrons jumping between energy levels and releasing photons at exact wavelengths. And while plasma is famously rare here on Earth, it makes up more than 99 percent of the visible universe. It’s the life force of the sun, the stars, lighting up nebulae where new stars are born, and shimmering across polar skies as the aurora. The dress is a beautiful walking metaphor for The Cosmos.

‘For years, I have been drawn to the idea of creating a garment woven from energy alone,” the designer wrote in the show notes. “We have shaped couture through solids, liquids, living matter and even gas. This is the first time we have worked with the fourth state of matter, plasma. Glass and tulle still hold it to the earth, but we are one step closer to couture that exists as atmosphere alone.”

Next came the Fractal Universe look: a dress that was literally charged inside a particle accelerator and cryogenically preserved, transforming the dress into “a metastable reservoir of energy, containing billions of trapped electrons that generate an
intense electric field held within its structure.” On the runway, it was literally a constellation of light, flickering brightly with its gorgeous charged electrons, expressing something organic but constant, and beautifully reactive. Now more than ever, we need designers like Iris Van Herpen to show us what’s possible when you think unconventionally.