Fashion and Commerce: Store for a Fashion Designer
The assignment for this project was to create a retail store for an upcoming fashion designer. I chose Dutch Fashion Designer Iris Van Herpen, who is best known for being today's leading fashion designer in the use of 3d printing.
For the design of Van Herpen’s first retail store, I tried to capture the materiality of some of these garments and transform them into functional architectural pieces:
- contiguous layers of acetate generate an undulating shoe display,
- reflective triangular pieces compose a sculptural background for garments,
- an intricate serpentine curved edge object mimics a section of a 3d printed product and creates a stage to showcase a permanent archive exhibition of one of a kind haute-couture dresses.
The program is divided into two floors: the main entrance is on the second floor, connected to the High Line and the general public, displaying a shoe collection available for sale plus an exhibition of one of a kind haute-couture pieces for public view only; the first floor is on the street level with the ready-to-wear collection, dressing rooms and storage area.
The punched openings of the store windows reveal the diferent materiality of the interior surfaces so as to reveal the diversity of Iris Van Harpen’s work.
