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.”