The Tamesis
The first piece visitors see when entering Iris van Herpen’s new exhibition at New York’s Brooklyn Museum is the designer’s 2016 bubble dress, a precursor to the 2026 iteration, which also emits blown bubbles and which went viral when Eileen Gu wore it to the Met Gala last week.
“Iris van Herpen: Sculptural Senses,” opening on May 16, is a repeat, but not an exact replica, of the original Paris exhibition, organized in 2023 by Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis of the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. Collaborating with the New York-based designer is Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture at the Brooklyn Museum, and Imani Williford, who adapted the original work. show—Van Herpen’s first big hit in America—to suit their surroundings. Yokoboski calls it a mid-career review, as this month marks Van Herpen’s 19th year in the industry.
Nearly two decades later, the designer remains unique. Van Herpen is one of the few to bring technology organically into the world of high fashion, demonstrating how exclusivity can be achieved through 3D printing. She has also harnessed the power of nature, creating mycelial lace and, most recently, a living dress made from 125 million bioluminescent algae. This luminous wonder comes to Brooklyn, where it’s encased in glass and regularly refreshed with mist.
Van Herpen’s performance in the fashion industry is somewhat biased. She had been a dancer for many years before attending ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands, which may explain her reverence for the body. Eschewing the usual star system and having scientists, artists and architects in her orbit, Van Herpen’s practice is highly collaborative; many of the works in the collection are jointly produced. In these partnerships, aesthetics are only part of the equation, as the focus is often on material development, technological advancement, and, believe it or not, functionality. “Certainly, you see a lot of collaborations in fashion that are driven by marketing,” Van Herpen said during a walkthrough for a recent fashion show. “But I think there are some collaborations here that are trying to get the fashion industry to look at new materials, find new ways to make things, but also introduce sustainability and try to change the way we work.”
“I love the collaborations I’m doing because, to me, the process is more important than the end result, and the process is really an ongoing study,” she said. “It’s shaping me, it’s shaping me, and by collaborating with people from other disciplines you can really share knowledge. [When] Fashion stays in its own bubble, it doesn’t respond to the world. Of course, I think this exhibition is about really showing the interaction between philosophy, science, fashion and art. “
Visitors can immerse themselves in van Herpen’s world in 11 themed areas. If the Met’s “Costume Art” examines the topography of the body and its organs, “Sculpting the Senses” goes much deeper, to the molecular level, engaging not just humans but the natural world. The exhibition is brilliantly organized, moving from the micro to the macro, starting with the blue of water and ending with the blue of the universe, as Jakobowski said. Along the way, he adds, “you start to see relationships between different life forms.” But also between art, nature and fashion.
In the first half of 2026, an interesting trend emerged, namely three exhibitions in which clothing was directly paired with artwork. The FIT Museum kicked off with “Art x Fashion,” currently on display at the Met’s new Condé M. Nast Gallery, Andrew Bolton’s “The Art of Costume,” which opened to the public on May 10. Among them, a variety of art is paired with clothing to demonstrate the centrality of the clothed body in the museum’s collection. “Iris van Herpen: The Sculptural Senses” completes the triptych by including artworks, although there are far fewer than those at the Met, and they serve different purposes, most often emphasizing the incredible materiality of van Herpen’s works and their organic, shape-shifting shapes.
