Beginning Might 16, 2026, the Brooklyn Museum will host the North American debut of Iris van Herpen‘s Sculpting the Senses, a serious exhibition that brings collectively greater than 140 of the designer’s most placing couture items. The exhibition contains attire impressed by water, air, coral reefs, and area.
Van Herpen is understood for pushing trend far past simply material and thread. She blends handmade couture methods with cutting-edge know-how, together with 3D printing, new supplies, and scientific concepts pulled from fields like biology, physics, and astronomy. The result’s clothes that feels prefer it’s alive, shifting, and reacting to the physique in shocking methods.
Iris van Herpen’s Labyrinthine Kimono Gown, from the Sensory Seas assortment, 2020. Glass organza, crepe, tulle, and Mylar. Picture courtesy of David Ụzọchukwu.
On the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will take guests on a journey, “beginning deep underneath the ocean and stretching all the best way into the universe.” Alongside the best way, it explores large concepts, like how the physique strikes, how we sense sound and light-weight, how nature is constructed, and the way people match right into a altering world. Every part focuses on a theme, from water and movement to skeletons, area, and interconnected pure techniques.
What makes Sculpting the Senses particularly superb is that Van Herpen’s designs might be proven together with up to date artworks, design objects, and actual scientific specimens like coral, fossils, and skeletons. In reality, these are the identical sorts of buildings and patterns that encourage her work, making it simpler to see how science turns into trend.
The exhibition additionally exhibits how Van Herpen works. The museum has recreated a studio area that lets guests see the work behind her couture.
Iris van Herpen’s Sensory Seas Gown, from the Sensory Seas assortment, 2020. PETG and glass organza. Picture courtesy of David Ụzọchukwu.
Initially launched in Paris in 2023, the exhibition has already traveled the world, stopping in Australia, Singapore, and the Netherlands. Its arrival in Brooklyn marks Van Herpen’s first main exhibition in New York, and opens through the Brooklyn Museum’s annual Artists Ball, the place she’ll be honored.
Nonetheless, Van Herpen’s work goes past museums. She was the primary designer to ship a 3D printed gown down the runway, again in 2010, and her sculptural designs have been worn by artists and performers together with Beyoncé, Björk, Girl Gaga, and Naomi Campbell.
As a substitute of treating 3D printing as a novelty, the designer used it to discover shapes that would not be made by hand alone, which embody delicate lattices, flowing buildings, and kinds that appear to develop naturally across the physique in a means that was by no means seen earlier than. Her early collaborations with architects, engineers, and artists helped flip printed plastics into versatile, wearable couture.
Iris van Herpen’s Morphogenesis gown, from the Sensory Seas assortment, 2020. Laser-cut and screenprinted mesh, duchesse satin, and laser-cut Plexiglas. Picture courtesy of David Ụzọchukwu.
Over time, Van Herpen has stored utilizing 3D printing in new methods, usually mixing it with conventional handwork. Some items use printed buildings impressed by bones or coral, whereas others mix 3D printed components with materials like silk. So as an alternative of changing trend craftsmanship, the know-how works together with it. For Van Herpen, 3D printing makes it doable to create shapes that transfer, circulation, and develop like kinds present in nature, one thing material all by itself can’t at all times do.
Van Herpen works with skilled 3D printing and digital fabrication instruments. Early in her profession, she used applied sciences like PolyJet printing to make very skinny printed items, tiny, delicate components that would then be connected to material.
Over time, she started mixing 3D printing with different methods like laser reducing to construct advanced patterns and buildings that will be virtually inconceivable to make by hand.
For this exhibition, the main target is on nature, know-how, and what trend can turn into. That method matches naturally on the Brooklyn Museum, which has a protracted historical past of main trend exhibitions, together with exhibits devoted to designers like Jean Paul Gaultier, Christian Dior, and Thierry Mugler. The exhibition additionally displays the museum’s roots as a spot that connects artwork and science, whereas persevering with its deal with highlighting ladies who’re shaping artistic fields at present.
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