Time for something you have to see to believe: Gwendoline Christie—a.k.a. Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones and Captain Phasma from Star Wars: The Force Awakens—recently joined forces with Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen and fashion photographer-director Barnaby Roper. Together they created three minutes and 12 seconds of pure chic futuristic bliss featuring a shifting 3D-printed dress. Take a look at the short film titled “The Dress” below, created by Nowness and found via Boing Boing. The last 10 seconds are super eerie.
Mind blown? Yeah, ours too. In a statement for Nowness, Roper noted, “I wanted to explore the idea of a morphing virtual dress, and after meeting Iris I quickly understood that her designers are organic, their structures taken from nature. So despite the film being very heavy in post-production, the texture of the garment had to be fluid and feel like it was from nature. I wanted to show the dress of the future—to have it literally growing out of the ground.”
And how about Christie’s powerful presence in “The Dress?” Don’t mess with this beauty. She’s famously known for her 6′ 3” stature, so modeling isn’t too far of a stretch for her. But stranded in this digitally rendered world of Alien proportions, enveloped in a living-breathing scale dress—which plays similar to that creepy on stage transformation scene from Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, I must add—Christie commands the screen as part dancer, part actress, and part supernatural being.
This abstract short film is part of a collaboration which Christie and van Herpen have been building since 2015. The two originally worked together at Paris Fashion Week, showcasing the alienesque 3D printed dress for van Herpen’s Ready-to-Wear Spring/Summer 2016 collection called “Quaruaversal.” That same dress was live-printed onto Christie’s resting body as the rest of the collection drifted by her in usual runway manner. Van Herpen pulled inspiration for this concept from the word quaruaversal which Merrim-Webster defines as “dipping from a center toward all points of the compass.”
You can check out video from that fashion show on Iris van Herpen’s Official YouTube.
Uniting fashion and technology might seem bizarre but it’s certainly not a new concept. Fashion schools today rely heavily on the STEM subjects and 3D printing is just the latest techniques added to the arsenal of fashion-tech mergers for designers like Iris van Herpen. Since her start as a intern to the late avant-garde designer Alexander McQueen, van Herpen has built a fashion empire that rests on her abilities to create innovative sculptural designs and produce engaging collaborative fashion shows.
Working under her own self-titled label since 2007, past collaborations for her collections have included musicians Grimes, Björk, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and actress Tilda Swinton. And for even more context about her general awesomeness, here are some of the futuristic titles from her past fashion shows: HACKING INFINITY, MAGNETIC MOTION, BIOPIRACY, and EMBOSSED SOUNDS. We can only imagine what the next blast of inspiration will be for Iris van Herpen.
Share your thoughts below on “the dress of the future” and Gwendoline Christie memorizing performance wearing it.
Featured Image: HBO
Images: Nowness/Vimeo, and Iris van Herpen/YouTube
