If you’re a follower of fashion, you’ll know the name Iris van Herpen. The 40-year-old Dutch designer has been a fixture – and one of the most hotly anticipated participants – at Paris Haute Couture Week since 2007, and her work is already being collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Last year, she became the youngest female designer to have her own exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and the French Ministry of Culture honoured her with the title Chevalier des Arts et Lettres.
The designs underpinning this success are extraordinary. Part ethereal fairy tale, part science fiction, they move around the body like living sculptures. She is boundary-pushing, experimental, capable of simultaneously transcending and elevating the human bodies she dresses – including the likes of Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé. A greater part of this wizardry is achieved using chiffon.
Like the name of so many textiles, the word is French in origin: chiffe means cloth or rag. Despite this unflattering etymology, the fabric is one of the most luxurious in history.
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The method used to make chiffon is a plain weave, in which the warp and weft threads alternate over and under each other, creating an open, grid-like structure: the most basic pattern. Sounds simple, but it gets complicated – the threads used must switch between S- and Z-twist crepe yarns. Spinning thread makes it stronger and denser, while giving it a little stretch; crepe yarns are twisted more tightly than usual. You can spin fibres clockwise (a Z-twist) or anticlockwise (an S-twist) and the resultant fibres can give subtly different effects depending on how they are combined and worked with.
This process gives chiffon unique qualities: it’s sheer and lightweight, but it has body and movement and drapes well, making it especially suitable for evening gowns and underwear. In its earliest days, chiffon was made exclusively from silk, creating a lustrous and soft fabric, but it can also be made from any other natural and synthetic fibres, including cotton, nylon and polyester.
Unfortunately, the very qualities that make chiffon so fine also make it rather fragile, but it still finds its way into our homes.
The most obvious way to incorporate it is with sheer curtains, where – in common with similar materials, such as voile, a softer, slightly more opaque cotton fabric – it provides a modicum of privacy and interacts beautifully with the light, while keeping a room feeling fresh and airy. The other use is in lighting, as it can be layered, ruffled and pleated to create any number of effects – as seen in the relatively humble ‘Stefanie’ (by Anthropologie) and ‘Mist’ (from Sazy) lampshades, as well as the more elaborate creations such as the ‘Ville’, a ruffled design by Lightbox that wouldn’t look out of place floating above an Iris van Herpen catwalk.
