The first piece visitors encounter upon entering Iris van Herpen’s new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York is the designer’s 2016 bubble dress—a precursor to the 2026 iteration, which also emitted blown bubbles, that went viral when Eileen Gu wore it to the Met Gala last week.
Opening on May 16, “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” iterates on but does not exactly replicate the original 2023 show in Paris (organized by Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs). Working in concert with the designer from New York are Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture at the Brooklyn Museum, and curatorial assistant Imani Williford, who have adapted the show—van Herpen’s first big splash stateside—to fit their environs. Yokobosky calls it a mid-career retrospective as this month marks van Herpen’s 19th year in business.
Almost two decades in, the designer remains sui generis. Van Herpen is one of the few to convincingly and organically introduce technology to couture, showing how uniqueness can be achieved through 3D printing. And she has channeled the forces of nature, creating mycelium lace and, most recently, a living dress made of 125 million bioluminescent algae. This luminous wonder has made the trip to Brooklyn, where it is encased in glass and regularly refreshed with mist.
Van Herpen approaches fashion somewhat sideways, having been a dancer for years before attending the ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands, which may explain her reverence for the body. Eschewing the usual star system—and with scientists, artists, and architects in her orbit—van Herpen’s practice is extremely collaborative; many of the pieces in the collections are co-credited. In these partnerships, aesthetics are only a part of the equation, as the focus is often on material development, technical advancement, and, believe it or not, functionality. “Of course, you see a lot of collaborations in fashion that are marketing driven,” said van Herpen on a recent walkthrough of the show. “But here are collaborations that try to get fashion to find new materials, find new ways of making, but also to bring in sustainability to try to change the way we work.”
She continued: “I love the collaborations because for me the process is even more important than the results and the process is really an ongoing research,” she said. “It’s shaping me, it’s forming me, and by working with people from other disciplines, you really share knowledge. [When] fashion stays within its own bubble, it’s not responding to the world. I think this exhibition is to really show the interproductiveness between philosophy, science, fashion, and art, of course.”
Visitors’ immersion into van Herpen’s world takes place within 11 themed sections. If The Met’s “Costume Art” examines the topography of the body and its organs, “Sculpting the Senses” drills down much deeper, to the molecular level—and not just of people but of the natural world as well. The exhibition’s choreography is well-done, as it travels from the micro to the macro and, as Yokobosky noted, begins with the blue of water and ends with the blue of the cosmos. Along the way, he added, “you start to see relationships between different life-forms”—and also between art, nature, and fashion.
In the first half of 2026, an interesting trend has emerged: three exhibitions that directly pair garments and artworks. The Museum at FIT kicked things off with “Art X Fashion,” and now on display in The Met’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries is Andrew Bolton’s “Costume Art,” which opened to the public on May 10. In it, art of all kinds is paired with garments to show the centrality of the dressed body across the museum’s collections. “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” completes the triptych by including artworks, though many fewer than at The Met, and they are used to different ends, most often to highlight the incredible materiality of van Herpen’s work and its organic, morphing shapes.
Take, for example, a 19th-century wooden Gothic corner chair, situated near a 2011 dress inspired by Gothic European cathedrals and alchemy. Made in collaboration with architect Isaïe Bloch, the dress is constructed of copper-electroplated 3D-printed polyamide. A Naum Gabo sculpture is included in the Synesthesia section, while a giant fossil on loan from the American Museum of Natural History moves through time in the Skeletal Embodiment room. Also on view is a version of van Herpen’s 3D-printed skeleton dress from 2011, which is concurrently on view at The Met. This is possible, the designer explained, because she makes copies of all pieces that leave the studio.
During the show’s run, van Herpen plans to make a dress in public. That’s one of the many interactive and dynamic elements of this exhibition, which includes moving, mechanized garments, microscopes for peering at material samples, and many videos (including those displaying dressmaking projected on screens that unfurl from dress forms like outsized thought bubbles in the Atelier room). Further along, clips from fashion shows show these fantastical garments in motion.
As if that weren’t enough, there are several pop culture tie-ins. Beyoncé generously lent the dress van Herpen crafted for her Renaissance tour, and Grimes’s 2021 Met Gala look is on view, as is a Mother Mary costume the designer made for Anne Hathaway. (Made of a fabric in a red to black gradient, it features varied-sized pleats and is regal in its ocean swell of a silhouette; Hathaway wore it to a premiere last month.) If a wall of muses (photos of celebrities wearing van Herpen) feels self-serving, that’s a blip in a show—and a career—that is all about connections, continuity, and movement. Kismet pairs a piece from the Brooklyn Museum’s own collection—a quasar-shaped installation of mirrored glass, Extra Life by Rob Wynne—with a 2021 van Herpen dress called Holobiont; both are made using individually numbered pieces and a matching template. Opposite Extra Life, mannequins hang from the ceiling like bats or are suspended horizontally, mimicking the weightlessness of space. The curator reported that the designer had suggested working with NASA to make them levitate.
Indeed, there is a sense of airiness and openness throughout the exhibition, partly due to the spacious galleries and partly to the fact that many of the clothes have an exoskeletal construction or are designed to optimize movement. Actual or implied kineticism is also pervasive in this show; make sure to see the mechanical headpiece and the Splash dress, which is caught in an eternal moment of suspended animation.
It’s notable that both “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” and “Costume Art” are on view amid the AI revolution, which has raised fears that machines and algorithms will subsume the human touch. Whether a computer can create art is already being debated, but the body is central to our humanity, and nature is perhaps the greatest artist of all. It was interesting, then, to read that van Herpen grew up in the same area as the 16th-century painter Hieronymus Bosch, famous for The Garden of Earthly Delights (which has inspired designers from Alexander McQueen to Undercover’s Jun Takahashi). Van Herpen certainly doesn’t shy away from the darker elements of life: A section of the show is titled Mythology of Fear, and yet her work demonstrates a fearless desire to harness technology to work more sustainably. Nature is often described as wild, but the designer noted, “Collaboration and symbolism are much stronger forces within nature than competition.” It’s also more powerful than a machine can ever be. It seems there’s a lot we can learn by going back to the roots of what makes us human, be that on the microscopic, corporeal, or philosophical levels. In a divided world, van Herpen’s message is one of interconnectedness.
Water and Dreams
Sensory Sea Life
Forces Behind the Forms
Atelier
Synethesia
Skeletal Embodiment
Mythology of Fear
Growth Systems
Cabinet of Curiosities
Cosmic Bloom
New Nature
“Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum from May 16 through December 6, 2026.
