Iris van Herpen held up a light-as-air fabric, constructed in a honeycomb pattern. “Do you mean every one of these squares has a stitch?” Marc Happel, the director of costumes at New York City Ballet, asked. He put his head in his hands.
“We did it for Beyoncé,” van Herpen said.
“If it’s good enough for Beyoncé,” Happel responded, “it’s good enough for us.”
Van Herpen, the Dutch fashion designer known for her dazzlingly futuristic, sculptural inventions, was in her Amsterdam studio in July, walking Happel through her designs for a new ballet by Jamar Roberts. The piece, “Foreseeable Future,” had its premiere on Wednesday night at City Ballet’s annual fall fashion gala, which began in 2012 when the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, a board member, suggested commissioning new works that paired choreographers and fashion designers.
Over 13 galas and more than 30 collaborations, there have been some hits but also frequent misses. “A lot of the time, choreographers are thinking about the movement,” Happel said, “the designers are busy with their own shows, and the costumes happen at a later stage. Then I have to try to delicately collaborate in coming up with something that is more danceable. But not in this case.”
The Concept
The first step, Happel said, is talking to the choreographers to discuss whether they have thoughts about designers. “A lot of the time, they aren’t so connected to the fashion world,” he said, “and don’t have strong ideas. But it was totally different with Jamar, who sat down and said ‘I would love to work with Iris van Herpen.’”
For Roberts, though not for all choreographers, costume design is an integral part of making a dance. “I think I’m a visual artist in general,” he said. “Dance just happens to be my medium.”
A former dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Roberts even took a break when he was with the company to spend a semester at the Fashion Institute of Technology. While the resident choreographer at Ailey from 2019 to 2022, he designed the costumes for all his own works.
“For someone like me, into art and fashion and design, Iris’s work is hard to miss,” he said, citing her presence in the world of pop music, movies and the art world. “It’s so cool and out of this world and unique. I thought, why not collaborate with someone like that?”
Happel was thrilled. He had worked with van Herpen for the 2013 fashion gala, when she designed costumes for Benjamin Millepied’s “Neverwhere.” That process, he said, “made me feel that costume-making, which is a very antiquated practice really, moved into the 21st century.”
Van Herpen, who studied ballet for 10 years, agreed immediately to the new commission. “My mother was a dance teacher, and I love it so much,” she said in a video interview. “I get so much inspiration out of dancers and choreographers; it’s a lifeline to have that connection.”
Roberts sent van Herpen a note, with some thoughts about the dance and his choice of music, by Arca, a Venezuelan-born experimental musician and producer. Then he and van Herpen met online to talk and look at preliminary sketches.
That changed his thinking.
“I wanted to say something about our relationship to technology,” he said. “But I didn’t know how to turn it into a piece. When I looked at Iris’s designs, they looked like rare species, new creatures, winged and fantastical. It was the missing link: technology and nature, chaos and calm; aspects of our humanity.”
The Process
Van Herpen sent a number of sketches and samples to New York as well as a video to show how the fabric moves. “There were floor length gowns,” Roberts said, “winged shapes, things that felt almost like jellyfish, fabric so light it hung in the air.”
Van Herpen said that she tried to imagine the dancers — and the freedom of their movement — when designing. Roberts had divided the dance into two sections that they informally called calm and chaos. “To translate what Jamar had in mind for the calm sections, it was important to go beyond the shape of the body, to make it more than human, to have a spiritual quality. For that, the costumes are made from a fabric that is so thin it weighs almost nothing and has an aerial quality, like being in a cloud.” For Chaos, she added, the costumes are “more like an imaginary technologically smart armor for the future.”
Roberts was thrilled by van Herpen’s vision. “She really brought me out of a head space and into a place of more imagination and theater,” he said.
“Of course I chose the ideas that needed couture-technique construction,” he added. “Mark was like, ‘Arrghh, but let’s give the guy what he wants!’”
Happel traveled to Amsterdam to meet van Herpen and her team at her studio, which he called “a glorious think tank of design, new ideas and ways to make clothing.” They talked him through the construction techniques.
For the four dancers who represent calm, Happel said, they used diaphanous Japanese organzas that are too fragile to be cut in traditional ways. The organzas are digitally printed in an ombré, from the dancers’ flesh color to a vibrant red. They are then laser-cut into pattern shapes that are stitched together to create the women’s honeycomb patterned wings, skirts and bodices, and the men’s sleeves.
“When I first saw the sketches, they were pretty incredible, but I was a bit nervous,” Sara Mearns, a dancer on the calm squad, said in a telephone interview. “I was like, ‘Really, I am going to wear these massive wings?’ Then they made a mock-up and I could hardly tell they were on me. They react to the movement, and you aren’t fighting with the costume.”
For the chaos costumes, Happel said, intricate computer-printed patterns in silver mylar and very thin reflective rubber were “laser-cut and heat-set twice in our workshop onto net unitards or tulle, which were dyed to match the dancer’s skin tone.” The same mylar was heat-set in patterns on tights, which were then hand sewn to the edges of the women’s ballet slippers.
“I was thinking about the evolution of the human body in relation to technology,” van Herpen said. “The patterns in the very reflective material sort of break up the body, and you see it in a disrupted, hybrid way.”
When Roberts was working with the dancers in the studio, he kept the costumes in mind. “They really influenced the choreography,” he said. “When you know you have a costume with two-foot-wide wings on each side, you want to create movement that will magnify that.”
The Stage
Before a stage rehearsal, Naomi Corti, in a metallic-printed short triangle dress, flexed her foot experimentally. “The shoes feel really secure,” she said. “This all fits really well.”
Isabella LaFreniere tried out her wings, lifting her arms in sweeping curves, the light glimmering through the honeycomb of the organza, changing its shape and color as she moved. “I can see a lionfish in there,” van Herpen said quietly from the side.
After the run-through, Mearns said the real wings “were even lighter than the mock-up.”
“They are constantly flowing with your movement,” she said. “There is an in-the-moment spontaneity; they will move differently in every show.”
At the premiere, the curtain rose on the four winged dancers in curving, billowing motion, fairy-tale creatures whose bodies kept changing form. Then came the silvery chaos dancers, moving with angular, spiky energy to Arca’s grinding, pounding sounds.
Later in the piece, the winged beings and the silver, technological humans mingle in fractured encounters, the contrast between their costumes and movement suggesting two worlds that may not ever be in harmony. In the final moments, Mearns and Taylor Stanley crumple to the ground, the wings forming a vivid shell around their bodies.
The drama of the mutating shapes of the winged dancers set against the sharpness of the metallic silhouettes had created the contrast she was hoping for, van Herpen said after the premiere.
“They came alive onstage exactly as I had imagined and hoped they would.”
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