The Brooklyn Museum is hosting the most ambitious fashion exhibition of the year. It marks the first major New York presentation of Dutch designer Iris van Herpen, who has spent years proving that the line between couture, sculpture, and science is really just a matter of perspective.
Who is Iris van Herpen
She was born in 1984 in the small Dutch village of Wamel. Growing up close to nature and classical dance shaped her design language early on, and both influences still run through her work today. In 2007, she founded her own house, Maison Iris van Herpen, in Amsterdam. Three years later, she made history: she became the first designer to bring 3D-printed garments to the runway, with her Crystallization collection in 2010. Since then, her haute couture pieces have been worn by names like Beyoncé, Björk, Lady Gaga, Rosalía, and Zoë Kravitz.
Fashion as science
Unlike many designers, van Herpen doesn’t draw from other designers at all. Instead, she pulls from mathematics, neuroscience, marine biology, paleontology, mycology, mineralogy, and astronomy. As a result, her garments echo coral reefs, branching fungi, and planetary orbits. The exhibition traces that range, taking visitors from the depths of the ocean to the far reaches of the universe, through themes like skeletal architecture, the physics of movement, and the perception of sound and light.
Brooklyn is the show’s latest stop after Paris, Brisbane, Singapore, and Rotterdam. It originally premiered in 2023 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Now, the Brooklyn Museum’s version brings together more than 140 haute couture pieces. Alongside them sit contemporary artworks by Wim Delvoye, Nick Knight, Tim Walker, and others. The show also includes genuine scientific specimens: coral, fossils, and skeletons. Meanwhile, Dutch composer Salvador Breed created the exhibition’s soundscape.
A studio inside the museum
Still, the exhibition’s most personal moment can’t be captured from a distance. Throughout the show’s run, van Herpen appears in person in the museum’s central rotunda. The space is designed to echo her Amsterdam studio. There, she sits at a table with visitors and drapes fabric alongside them.
New York Times journalist Roslyn Sulcas experienced it firsthand. She described the atmosphere as calm and focused, with visitors moving slowly through the gallery and pausing at microscopes along the way. According to van Herpen, she wants to show how technical and complex her process looks from the outside, even though it remains deeply human at its core.
She plans to embroider the conversations that emerge from this draping work into the lining of the finished garment. That garment is taking shape inside the museum itself. Eventually, it will become a kind of time capsule, inspired directly by New York’s visitors. Van Herpen will return to Brooklyn in October to complete it.
Van Herpen and Koolhaas: two sides of one name
Within the context of Sculpting the Senses, one more connection stands out. The name Koolhaas links to Iris van Herpen twice, on two entirely different levels.
The direct link comes through her collaboration with Rem D. Koolhaas, founder of United Nude and nephew of architect Rem Koolhaas. Together, they created a series of conceptual shoes for Paris Couture Week: Crystallization in 2011, inspired by ice; Fang in 2012, featuring carbon-fiber “fangs”; and Wilderness Embodied in 2013, the first fully 3D-printed shoes ever shown on a Paris runway.
The indirect link runs through the exhibition’s own journey. Before Brooklyn, Sculpting the Senses also travelled to Kunsthal Rotterdam. That building was designed in 1992 by none other than uncle Rem Koolhaas and his studio, OMA, and it now stands as one of the defining structures of European deconstructivism. On one side, then, sits the architecture of shoes designed by the nephew; on the other, the architecture of a building designed by the uncle. Between them stands one Dutch designer, Iris van Herpen, who has approached fashion as a form of construction from the very start.
Brooklyn Museum’s fashion legacy
This exhibition builds on a tradition the museum has upheld for nearly a century. That tradition stretches back to The Story of Silk in 1934. Since then, the museum has hosted retrospectives for names like Elsa Schiaparelli in 1994, Jean Paul Gaultier in 2013, Christian Dior in 2021, and Thierry Mugler in 2022. At the same time, the show reflects the museum’s long-standing commitment to pioneering female artists. Notably, the museum is also home to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the only center of its kind in the world.
Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses
Through December 6, 2026, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
