When Olympic skier Eileen Gu walked the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork on the Met Gala on Might 4, she wore a brief, shimmering robe that gave the impression to be product of 1000’s of iridescent cleaning soap bubbles caught mid-float, clustered throughout her physique and trailing into the air behind her.
It was created by Iris van Herpen in collaboration with the Tokyo-London design studio A.A.Murakami. Assembled from 15,000 hand-formed glass bubbles, it took 2,550 hours to assemble, and contained hidden microprocessors that launched actual bubbles into the air as Gu moved.
It was additionally a glimpse into the present that opens on the Brooklyn Museum on Might 16: Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, the North American debut of a retrospective that has already traveled from Paris to Brisbane, Australia, then Singapore and the Netherlands.
The 2016 authentic of that bubble gown might be within the present. “It represents the air that’s inside our our bodies,” says Matthew Yokobosky, the Brooklyn Museum’s senior curator of trend and materials tradition. “Over 90% of our our bodies are made up of air.”
Over 20 years, van Herpen has constructed a physique of labor that treats science as a inventive collaborator. She has made couture impressed by the air in our lungs, the structure of a stingray’s skeleton, the magnetic fields of the Massive Hadron Collider. She has labored with architects, paleontologists, and biologists, and used all the things from iron filings to magnets to bioluminescent algae as uncooked supplies. In doing so, she has quietly redefined what it means for trend to be artwork.
The Brooklyn Museum has been making that argument for practically a century. Its 1934 Story of Silk exhibition is usually cited as the start of trend’s museum period; it has since staged retrospectives of labor by Madame Grès, Schiaparelli, Jean Paul Gaultier, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Virgil Abloh, and Thierry Mugler. Sculpting the Senses extends the lineage.
Water in all its varieties
The bubble gown is a launchpad for the exhibit. “The present begins about completely different inspirations from the completely different types of water, liquid, frozen, gaseous, and the way all these completely different states have been equally informative for her as a design inspiration,” Yokobosky explains.
It’s paired with a bit by the Japanese artwork collective Mé, a piece that Yokobosky says “appears as if they’d taken a slice of the ocean and put it into the gallery.”
Van Herpen, who grew up within the Dutch village of Wamel, has returned repeatedly to water in all its states. That preoccupation goes again to the work that put her on the map. Her 2010 Crystallization assortment, constructed round limestone deposits, ice crystals, and the choreography of a splash, contained the primary 3D-printed garment ever proven on a trend runway.
The skeletal, ivory-colored prime made in collaboration with British architect Daniel Widrig, is on show in Brooklyn. Relying on the angle, the piece appears like a fossilized vertebra or a Dutch ruff from the seventeenth century. Materialise, the Belgian 3D-printing agency that helped fabricate it, had till then been making architectural fashions.
Bones, fossils, and a child dinosaur
For the reason that pure historical past specimens within the Paris model of van Herpen’s present couldn’t journey, Yokobosky struck up a brand new partnership with the American Museum of Pure Historical past. The Brooklyn present now contains an 80-million-year-old ichthyosaur skeleton and a child dinosaur, displayed in dialogue with van Herpen’s bone-inspired couture. A robe constructed across the structure of chicken skeletons sits close to the dinosaur fossils—a nod to the truth that birds are the closest residing kin of dinosaurs.
“Once you have a look at Iris’s robe, you don’t essentially see bones instantly, however as you look extra intently, you understand that there are all these articulations of bone,” Yokobosky says.
Biomimicry runs deep in van Herpen’s work. Her atelier doesn’t replicate a fish scale; it research how a fish scale is structured, then interprets that construction into a brand new materials. Lucid (2016) borrowed from the orb webs of argiope spiders. Sympoiesis and Sensory Seas took their cues from coral methods.
The designer’s work has a sustainability dimension too. Van Herpen has experimented with clothes made out of recycled plastic ocean waste, 3D-printed cocoa beans, and, final yr, created a “living” dress in collaboration with biodesigner Chris Bellamy that was seeded with 125 million bioluminescent algae.
In an business that produces someplace between 92 million and 100 million tons of textile waste yearly, the gesture means that clothes don’t have to return from petrochemicals. They will come from a lab, or a forest, or—sometimes—a tide pool.
The slowest trend
Essentially the most quietly radical part of the present stands out as the one with no garment in any respect. For the Brooklyn exhibit, van Herpen created a brand new video set up that takes the small, usually invisible gestures of her atelier—the location of a hand, the catch of a needle, the gradual accumulation of a single embroidered floor—and initiatives them, unedited and in actual time, onto 25-foot-high screens contained in the museum’s 70-foot rotunda.
“She actually needed individuals to grasp the gradual course of that goes into making couture . . . what emerges from this lengthy, meditative course of,” Yokobosky says.
Trend in 2026 is dominated by AI-generated lookbooks, Shein-style ultrafast cycles, and the more and more seamless integration of agentic commerce into the buying expertise. In distinction, van Herpen doesn’t even do ready-to-wear; she focuses totally on couture. She nonetheless makes all the things by hand, in collaboration with a rotating forged of scientists and artists, and he or she nonetheless sells the items. She simply doesn’t make very lots of them.
“She could be very dedicated to the craft of couture and to experimenting and serving to us perceive what is feasible in the way forward for trend,” Yokobosky says.
The Brooklyn present closes in an area the museum is looking Cosmic Bloom: a darkened room stuffed with mannequins suspended from the ceiling at unusual angles, sporting a few of van Herpen’s most surreal and saturated robes. It’s also a transparent assertion of what all the exhibition is arguing—that the physique, in van Herpen’s arms, isn’t a hanger for product. It’s a small piece of the universe, and clothes is among the languages we use to explain it.
Sculpting the Senses runs via December 6.
