Dear Shaded Viewers,
“Shift Souls” was the title of the recent couture collection of Iris Van Herpen. I found the collection heavenly, angels and birds, nature meets technology. Refreshing and original.
The collection was inspired by early examples of celestial cartography and its representations of mythological and astrological chimera, Van Herpen was particularly taken with ‘Harmonica Macrocosmica’, a star atlas by the German-Dutch cartographer Andreas Cellarius, published in 1600.
“For ‘Shift Souls’ I looked at the evolution of the human shape, its idealization through time and the hybridization of the female forms within mythology. Specially the imagination and the fluidity within identity change in Japanese mythology gave me the inspiration to explore the deeper meaning of identity and how immaterial and mutable it can become within the current coalescence of our digital bodies” — Iris van Herpen
All photos by Sonny Vandevelde
