Iris van Herpen's Paris Haute Couture Week algae dress is actually alive

Couture, the oldest and most elite of the fashion arts, the pieces made by hand for the very few, can sometimes seem like a fossil preserved in an amber corset.

- Vanessa Friedman

PARIS - Couture, the oldest and most elite of the fashion arts, the pieces made by hand for the very few, can sometimes seem like a fossil preserved in an amber corset.

Which is why Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen's work, both futuristic and deliberately kinetic, has always been so mesmerising: skirts that jounce like jellyfish, extrusions that tremble like palm fronds and sleeves that flutter like butterfly wings.

Even by her standards, however, the second look in the couture collection she showed in Paris on July 7 as part of Haute Couture Week was something else: It was actually alive.

Made of 125 million bioluminescent algae known as Pyrocystis lunula that glow in response to movement — think the luminescent plankton that can make the ocean seem lit from within — the dress-and-leggings combination was grown in a gelatin-like substance that was then moulded into one of van Herpen's signature sci-fi anatomical lattice frocks.

Wearing it, the model resembled a very regal, otherworldly crustacean.