Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen will create a dress modelled on splashing water during a live week-long broadcast for fashion film website SHOWstudio next month (+ movie).

Photographer Nick Knight will use high speed cameras to capture black and clear water thrown at actress Daphne Guinness, then Iris van Herpen will use the imagery to produce a one-off couture piece that will resemble flowing water.

Above and top: images from Iris van Herpen's Crystallisation Spring Summer 2011 collection by Bart Oomes

The project will build on the concept of liquid clothing that van Herpen showed in her Crystallisation collection at London Fashion Week in 2010. How the dress will be created and what it will made of will be revealed during the transmission.

"The water-dress symbolises for me the incomprehensible magic of the body," says van Herpen. "I often wonder if we will keep on wearing fabrics in future, or if dressing will become something non-material, something that is visible, but not tangible or touchable."

Above: image from Iris van Herpen's Crystallisation Spring Summer 2011 collection by Bart Oomes

SHOWstudio is to stream the project live between 3 and 9 April, which will culminate in Knight shooting Guinness in the completed outfit.

SHOWstudio will exhibit the dress at its new gallery space SHOWcabinet in June, then present the project at the Centre Pompidou in Paris later in the year.

Above: visualisation of Iris van Herpen's new water dress on Daphne Guinness by Roland Didier

Iris van Herpen also showed 3D-printed outfits during Paris Fashion Week earlier this month and has designed shoes for United Nude that have fangs protruding from the soles.

See all our stories about designs by Iris van Herpen »
See all our stories about fashion »