Stylecurated: IRIS VAN HERPEN: SCULPTING THE SENSES @ BROOKLYN MUSEUM

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Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses at the Brooklyn Museum

A decade after I roadtripped to Atlanta, Georgia to see Iris van Herpen's exhibit Transforming Fashion at the High Museum, Sculpting the Senses has landed in New York—and somehow, seeing Van Herpen’s work again feels both familiar and entirely new. The exhibition, on view at the Brooklyn Museum, brings together more than 140 haute couture creations with contemporary art, design, scientific artifacts, and natural-history specimens. Visitors can even walk into a recreated atelier and be surrounded by her creative process. Rather than presenting fashion as something simply worn, the exhibition asks us to consider clothing as an evolving relationship between the human body, nature, technology, movement, and the world around us. Keep reading to see inside the press preview....

Living Algae look in collaboration with Chris Bellamy (2025 Sympoiesis collection)

The experience is appropriately immersive. Van Herpen’s sculptural garments seem to hover somewhere between clothing and living organisms—delicate, otherworldly forms that can suggest coral, waves, skeletal structures, atmospheric phenomena, or something that has yet to exist. The Brooklyn presentation moves from the depths of the ocean toward the outer reaches of the universe, exploring ideas around water, motion, light, sound, perception, and interconnectedness. Works by artists and designers including Philip Beesley, Tara Donovan, Nick Knight, and others are woven into the exhibition, creating a larger conversation about how science and nature can become raw material for imagination.

[L] Ekstasis dress (Spring 2021 Roots of Rebirth collection), [R] "Origins" by David Spriggs

At the preview, van Herpen took us on a tour through her exhibit, stopping to explain the thought and production process behind many of her unique pieces. Van Herpen, the Dutch designer has spent nearly two decades challenging the traditional boundaries of haute couture. She founded her label in 2007 after studying at ArtEZ in the Netherlands and interning with Alexander McQueen, and she quickly became known for bringing experimental processes into fashion—including some of the earliest uses of 3D printing in garments. But technology is only part of the story. Her work also depends heavily on painstaking craftsmanship, material experimentation, architecture, dance, biology, and the physical movement of the body. That combination is what makes her pieces feel less like futuristic costumes and more like wearable sculpture.

Iris van Herpen talking through the pieces, the science and her creative process

Returning to Van Herpen’s work after that Atlanta road trip makes this Brooklyn exhibition feel like a full-circle moment. The High Museum’s 2015–2016 exhibition was Van Herpen’s first major U.S. museum presentation and introduced American audiences to her radically inventive approach to couture. Now, more than a decade later, Sculpting the Senses offers a chance to see how far that vision has expanded—and to be reminded that the most exciting fashion sometimes asks us to stop thinking about fashion altogether. Go see for yourself--Sculpting the Senses is on view until December 6, 2026.