Iris van Herpen Wins a Sustainability Award That's More Than a Sustainability Award
Being an innovative force in sustainable fashion isn’t enough to win the Perrier-Jouët Design for Nature Award. No, this prize is given to fashion designers who are both finding inventive ways to be more eco-friendly while creating designs infused with the spirit of the Art Nouveau movement.
Really, it’s an award that almost sounds like it was purpose-made for Dutch artist and haute couturier Iris van Herpen. So, it’s fitting that van Herpen is the Perrier-Jouët Design for Nature Award’s first recipient, as announced at the Design Miami art fair in early December.
“Her unique and inspiring vision epitomises the concept of the Award, which encourages designers to go beyond the dominant rhetoric of sustainability and to interrogate it with a joyful and optimistic lens,” said Axelle de Buffévent, creative director of the luxury drinks distributor Pernod Ricard Group, who chose Iris van Herpen together with Glenn Adamson, curatorial director of Design Miami 2025.
The duo was particularly impressed by the ocean-inspired 3D-printed gowns in van Herpen’s latest collection, “Sympoiesis,” shown at Paris Couture Week in July 2025. The clothing was shown alongside van Herpen’s first aerial sculptures, bringing her high-tech dressmaking ever closer to art.
As the winner of this prize, van Herpen will be given resources to further explore mediums beyond fashion. The award comes with the opportunity to create a unique work that will be showcased at Design Miami next year. “My work has long explored the symbiosis between fashion and art,” said van Herpen. “The opportunity to create a design-led experience at Design Miami 2026 is really inspiring and allows me to deepen my exploration of the ever-shifting relationship between our body and the living forces of nature.”
Iris van Herpen has already scored plenty of awards. Almost two decades of groundbreaking dressmaking have won her almost two dozen accolades, from receiving the FGI Fashion Visionary Award earlier this year to TIME naming her 3D-printed dresses one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2011. But now she has an award nobody else has (yet), the Perrier-Jouët Design for Nature Award.
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