Iris van Herpen – Shift Souls Runway Collection

One of fashion’s most progressive and imaginative designers, Iris van Herpen launched her incredible Shift Souls collection at Paris Fashion Week. Here are some visuals, and her inspiration behind this amazing collection.

Inspired by: early examples of celestial cartography and its representations of mythological and astrological chimera.

With the advances in DNA engineering and the first successful creations of human/anima hybrids called 'Cybrids', the mythological dreams of Humankind since the dawn of civilization are shifting to the canvas of science. This collection expresses the fact that this reality is upon us.

'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