Spiny translucent 3D-printed collars were paired with magnetic dresses and shoes that looks like tree roots in Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen's latest haute couture collection.
Iris van Herpen's Wilderness Embodied collection included dresses and jewellery that combine 3D-printing technology and natural forms.
"My Wilderness collection explores the wilderness that we as human have inside us as well as the wilderness in nature," she told Dezeen.
Pieces that wrapped around the length of the neck and extended down the chest were decorated with pointy globules tinted purple, blue and pink colours.
These elements were repeated in symmetrical patterns on the see-through layers worn over neutral dresses.
The collars and spiky elements on the dresses were designed in collaboration with architect Isaie Bloch and 3D-printed with additive manufacturing company Materialise.
This season Van Herpen also worked with designer Jólan van der Wiel to create a pair of dresses grown using magnets - find out more about them in our previous story.
"Natural forces like magnetism that are essential to life inspired me to not only use manmade techniques like 3D printing, but to combine technology with the creativity and power of nature itself," Van Herpen said.
Shown in Paris last month, the Autumn Winter 2013 collection also featured 3D-printed shoes that look like a tangle of roots designed with United Nude founder Rem D Koolhaas and printed by Stratasys.
We've featured a few of Van Herpen's previous collections that include 3D printing and interviewed the fashion designer for our one-off magazine Print Shift, during which she talked about how these technologies could transform the fashion industry.
Recently we posted a collection of 3D-printed jewellery by Dorry Hsu, inspired by her fear of insects.
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Read on for more information sent to us by van Herpen:
Nature is wild. Generated by powerful forces. It proliferates by creating startling beauty.
For her fifth collection as an invited member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, Iris van Herpen focuses on the forces of nature, with a back and forth between innovation and craftsmanship. Beyond simple visual inspiration, this wonder of the natural world forms the basis of wild experimentation.
With the help of artists, scientists and architects, Iris van Herpen explores the intricacies of these forces trough the medium of fashion, and the sensitive poetics that have long characterised her aesthetic vocabulary.
Through her collaboration with artist Jolan van der Wiel, who has spent several years pondering the possibilities of magnetism, they have created dresses whose very forms are generated by the phenomenon of attraction and repulsion.
Iris van Herpen draws equally upon the life force that pulses through the sculptures of David Altmejd. His wild organic forms derived from the regenerative processes of nature have greatly inspired Wilderness Embodied.
She proposes to reach this wild nature freedom into the human body and soul. The human spirit is forged of this same vital energy, coursing and erupting through the limits of the body in such resplendent displays of extreme tradition or technology as piercings, scarification or surgery.
This wild(er)ness of the human body, as unchecked as it is intimate, is one that the designer has sought to reveal the collection.Balancing respect for the traditions of atelier craftsmanship, with each garment subject to individual handwork, Iris van Herpen has nonetheless broadened the horizons of her domain: materials and processes.
With architect Isaie Bloch and Materialise she continues to develop the innovative 3D-printed dresses, which she was the first to present in both static and flexible forms. On the one hand, her long-term collaboration with Canadian architect Philip Beesley and, on the other had, her partnership with United Nude's Rem D. Koolhaas and Stratasys which has led to a line of shoes, help to spread the spirit of the collection.