With Voltage (2013), Iris van Herpen presented a couture collection that blurred the line between body and architecture. Using 3D printing, laser cutting, and high-voltage electromagnetic fields, the garments appeared to grow around the body like lightning frozen in form.

Scale is destabilized: the body becomes landscape, the garment becomes environment. Each piece reads simultaneously as intimate clothing and as monumental structure, collapsing distinctions between skin, sculpture, and space.

Representation in Voltage is not decorative but systemic. The garments act as diagrams of invisible forces, translating energy into form. Ambiguity sustains the collection: is this fashion, sculpture, or a biological experiment? The wearer becomes both human and cyborg, body and building.

Materiality is at the core of van Herpen’s work. Collaborating with scientists and architects, she pioneered the use of flexible 3D-printed polymers and translucent structures in couture, treating technology as fabric.

In the lens of Gesamtkunstwerk, Voltage exemplifies design as a total work: art, science, fashion, and architecture woven into one vocabulary. Each garment is more than clothing — it is a climate, a resonant system where body and world converge.