Iris van Herpen's Airo dress dissolves on Met Gala red carpet

Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, collaborating with Tokyo-London studio AA Murakami, created the Airo dress for Chinese-American freestyle skier Eileen Gu, who debuted it at the Met Gala in New York City. The garment is covered with 15,000 iridescent glass bubbles bonded with UV light, forming a fitted mini-dress silhouette. Hidden microprocessors under the skirt released pressurized gas in coordinated sequences, making the dress appear to dissolve into air. The microprocessors operated autonomously and silently via a dedicated digital interface. The dress took 2,550 hours over 15 weeks to produce by a team of experts in couture, science, and computational design. It responded to the Met Gala theme 'fashion is art' and echoed Gu's airborne grace as a skier. Van Herpen described the dress as expressing the body as transient and fluid. Last year, she created a dress from 125 million bioluminescent algae with biodesigner Chris Bellamy.