May will bring more than flowers when, on May 16, “Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” opens at the Brooklyn Museum. The first major review of the Dutch designer’s work stateside, the show originated at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, in 2023. Curated by Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis, the Brooklyn version is organized by Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture, Brooklyn Museum, with Imani Williford, and is supported by the Simons Foundation. Mirroring the interdisciplinary approach van Herpen brings to her work, the roughly 140 garments on view will be intermingled with objets d’art and scientific artifacts.
“Iris van Herpen represents a new kind of fashion intelligence—one that fuses couture, science, and technology to imagine what the world of clothing can become,” said Yokobosky. “This exhibition is not about looking back, but about encountering fashion as a living, evolving discipline.”
By connecting fashion with science and technology (which our industry has historically been slow to embrace), Van Herpen has forced us to revise longheld beliefs about what fashion—in particular couture—is and can be. In that rarified métier, value is tied to factors including preciousness of materials, time spent in specialized (hand) production, and scarcity (each garment being a one-off that iterates on the runway prototype). Van Herpen has created seismic shifts in the tradition-bound couture by employing 3D printing as a means to produce customer-specific one-offs. She’s also done a lot of creative laser cutting and bonding.
For Van Herpen, rare materials needn’t be festooned with metallic threads, elaborately hand woven, or made of highest quality silk. The glow of a “living look” dress from her fall 2025 show, for example, was created by 25 million bioluminescent algae, rather than cloth of gold, and she collaborated with an artist who created lace motifs based on patterns that grew on wood for her spring 2021 collection. One of the hallmarks of Van Herpen’s work is using technology in ways that mirror the natural world. Sustainability is close to her heart: She’s worked with Parley for the Oceans and for fall 2025 designed looks in Spiber Brewed Protein, a biomaterial made from fermented sugarcane that is a biodegradable blend of raw-silk and banana leaf.
The third tenet of Van Herpen’s practice is collaboration; she’s teamed up with scientists, artists, engineers, and even Domitille Kiger, the French female world-champion skydiver, who wore an IvH creation when descending from the sky to earth. (The clothes were pre-tested in wind tunnels.) A trained ballerina, Van Herpen likes to emphasize the kinetic motion of clothes and the body.
As museums have discovered that fashion draws people to their institutions, the curation of shows on the subject is rapidly evolving. An applied art, fashion has often been sidelined as decorative and “feminine” and relegated to basements, reflecting its supposed place in the art hierarchy. May will provide evidence to the contrary with the opening of the Condé M. Nast galleries on the first floor of the Met and the debut of “Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” in Brooklyn. Making this iteration of the traveling show unique, is the incorporation of objects, including a 1732 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis (the book around which the designer built her fall 2022 couture collection) from the institution’s collections.
Although the Brooklyn Museum transferred its costume holdings to the Costume Institute in 2009, BAM has presented one blockbuster exhibition after another, many monographs (Virgil Abloh, Thierry Mugler, Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, Jean Paul Gaultier), and some on broad themes: “Solid Gold,” “Africa Fashion,” “Studio 54: Night Magic.” How does Yokobosky see “Sculpting the Senses,” fitting in—and standing out—from this schema?
“For Dior, I incorporated over 20 significant works from the museum’s permanent collection, offering conversations between Christian Dior’s interests, his successors, and artists whose work engaged similarly,” the curator explained. “For example, in the mid-1950s, Christian Dior spoke about how every season he is offered a panoply of beautiful fabrics in many colors, but at the end of the day he would be happy to just work in black…which to me, spoke to the works of artists like Louise Nevelson and Ad Reinhardt, who made similar convictions about the color black. That was a major highlight for me, visually bringing those dresses and artworks in conversation.” He continued: “For Iris van Herpen, her mood boards aren’t filled with fashions and photographs of past decades, but with images of the aquatic universe, drawings of the nervous system, and millions of years old paleontology specimens. Her references are unlike those of other designers of dresses and gowns, and so her creations have both an other-worldly and ‘new’ aspect. And so for this exhibition, ‘Sculpting the Senses,’ we are including objects such as coral and a work by Collectif Me, that appears as if a ‘slice of ocean’ was brought into the gallery.”
The Van Herpen exhibition is not a retrospective in the same way that, say, Mugler’s was because she is alive, her career is still very much a work in progress, and, as Yokobosky notes, “Van Herpen’s work feels profoundly of the present.” As a result, what visitors will come away with is less a contextualization of fashion work in the past than a developing story, which is likely to affect how people experience the exhibition. Rather than projecting possible takeaways from the show, the curator said, “I like them to feel immersed in the subject, in the experience—which includes visual candy as well as intriguing written information. Sometimes sound, and more. Each person can tune into what they find interesting and walk away with a different feeling and different knowledge, and more—through their own associations. So I don’t think there’s one outcome, but many permutations.” This is a curatorial approach that syncs with how people are thinking more broadly about style today.
