Iris van Herpen’s mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum begins, as all things did, with water.
“We come from the sea,” says the couturier. “That’s why I wanted to start with water, the origin of life.” The first looks of “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses”—a mini dress made of delicate glass bubbles caught perpetually mid-twirl, worn by Olympic skier Eileen Gu at this year’s Met Gala, and a garment cascading up and out like a placid lake caught mid-splash—set the tone for an exhibition driven by biomorphic structures and sensations. One dress was modeled on the chronophotographic lines created by birds’ wing movement. Another on an insect’s exoskeleton. Van Herpen, who first inked headlines for her use of then-novel 3D printing technologies nearly two decades ago, executes her garments with a scientist’s precision and toolkit. The exhibition’s labels catalog a laboratory’s worth of gizmos: theraformed PETG waves, geodesic domes, and laser-cut fabric dendrites, to name a few.
“Sculpting the Senses,” initially mounted at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2023, is the designer’s first major museum presentation Stateside. It offers over 140 haute couture looks alongside artworks, design objects, fossils, videos, and natural specimens. The designer has dressed everyone from Beyoncé to Cate Blanchett, but few celebrity faces appear in the show. Instead, the exhibition’s 11 themed rooms tackle van Herpen’s chief interests: skeletal structures, primordial fear, and the movements of the cosmos.
Material exploration is at the heart of the show, and it’s on full display with its centerpiece, the Atelier. The fourth of the themed rooms teems with swatches, prototypes, silicone latticework, mycelium lace, and 3D-printed polyamide on dress forms, across the walls, and even underneath microscope slides that guests are invited to peer through. 
“My work is about so many different techniques—contemporary ones, but also historic ones—and they’re equally beautiful and important,” says van Herpen. She’s partial to collaboration with architects, scientists, dancers, and artists. One garment, a gown made from 125 million bioluminescent algae, took three months to construct with the help of a team from the University of Amsterdam and biodesigner Christopher Bellamy (in the show, it lives behind glass and is periodically misted to stay fresh).
Her latest fascination is 4D printing, an experimental technology that’s just as futuristic as it sounds. “It means that a material has a memory, and you can code the memory so it can change shape over time,” says van Herpen. For now, it’s purely theoretical, but that’s never stopped her before.
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