By: Alina Cepeda
Style icons like Sarah Jessica Parker and Julia Fox show support for Van Herpen on the red Carpet.
Iris Van Herpen showcases her costume design collaboration with the New York City Ballet Academy at the 13th annual Fall Fashion Gala on October 8th, 2025. In the NYC ballet design studio, she works with costume director Marc Happel to create a balance of storytelling within fashion and mobility for dance.
The pieces were displayed in choreographer Jamar Roberts’ new program “Foreseeable Future.” The purpose of the Fall Fashion Gala is to showcase the latest fall performances, visionary pairings between ballet and high fashion, and to highlight how they are essential to one another.
Van Herpen states, “Jamar wanted to express the contradiction between the beauty of the natural world, and against that, the rapid technological evolution that is happening.” Her designs incorporate wings and ghost-like fabric that is light enough to move with dancers. She revisits her “honeycomb” design structure from her Spring 2025 pieces using super-light Japanese air fabric stitched in many layers. Happel and Roberts immediately had Van Harpen in mind for the designer.
“Her designs have always been so sculptural, Jamar noticed and understood how it would flow as a dancer…two different worlds meeting and working beautifully together,” Happel says. Van Herpen used to be a dancer before she moved onto design, so creating costumes for ballet dancers is a full circle moment for her. Happel states, “it’s incredibly advantageous because she already knows how costume needs to move with dance and not to inhibit them.”
Just before the final fitting, Van Herpen reminisces about her dance past. She expresses how the whole purpose of the Fall Fashion Gala reflects how intertwined dance and fashion have been within her life, “I feel very at home in this project, and it feels so aligned with the layers that I bring to my work.”
