Iris van Herpen Turns Plasma Into a Glowing Couture Dress

Iris van Herpen has brought one of the universe’s most elusive materials onto the couture runway, creating a dress that uses glowing plasma-filled glass elements to respond to the touch and movement of the person wearing it.

Unveiled during Paris Couture Week as part of her “Sonic Starquakes” collection, “Helix Nebula” is presented as the first couture garment to incorporate plasma, ionised gas capable of carrying an electrical charge. Van Herpen developed the piece with American artist Mundy Hepburn, who helped create the hand-shaped glass structures containing the material.

The effect begins when the garment comes into contact with the wearer’s body. As the body conducts the plasma’s electrical field, charged particles move through the glass and release photons at specific wavelengths. The result is a vivid red glow, with flashes of colour travelling through the sculptural forms as the wearer moves.

The principle has a familiar precedent: neon lighting works through a similar process, with gas becoming luminous plasma when an electrical voltage passes through it. On Earth, plasma appears naturally in phenomena such as lightning and the Northern Lights. On a cosmic scale, however, it occupies an entirely different territory, accounting for an estimated 99.9 per cent of the visible universe.

For Van Herpen, bringing it into fashion continues a long interest in materials that sit outside conventional definitions of a garment. Her work has previously explored solids, liquids, living matter and gases; “Helix Nebula” moves into plasma, the fourth state of matter.

The rest of the dress is built from translucent tulle covered with approximately 8,000 hand-blown glass spheres. Each sphere was attached using UV light, creating a dense but delicate surface across the fabric.

The spheres are also connected to one of Van Herpen’s recent experiments. Thousands of similar elements appeared on the “iridescent bubble” dress created for Chinese-American athlete Eileen Gu‘s appearance at this year’s Met Gala, where the garment became one of the season’s most widely circulated fashion images.

“Helix Nebula” is one of 17 looks presented in the “Sonic Starquakes” collection, which draws on invisible physical forces and the structures they produce across vastly different scales.

Van Herpen’s references move between the microscopic and the planetary: branching patterns found in neural networks and blood vessels, river deltas, electrical storms on Jupiter and the larger movements of energy through the universe.

Here, those ideas are given a physical presence, held inside glass, attached to tulle and activated by the body itself.