The first piece visitors encounter upon entering Iris van Herpen’s new exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York is the designer’s 2016 bubble dress, a precursor to the 2026 iteration, which also emitted blown bubbles, that went viral when Eileen Gu wore it to the Met Gala last week.

Opening on May 16, “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” iterates on, but does not exactly replicate, the original show in Paris, which was organized by Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2023. Working in concert with the designer from New York is Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture, Brooklyn Museum, and Imani Williford, who have adapted the show—van Herpen’s first big splash stateside—to fit their environs. Yokobosky calls it a mid-career retrospective as this month marks van Herpen’s 19th year in business.

Almost two decades in, the designer remains sui generis. Van Herpen is one of the few to convincingly and organically introduce technology to couture, showing how uniqueness can be achieved through 3D printing. And she has channeled the forces of nature, creating mycelium lace and, most recently, a living dress made of 125 million bioluminescent algae. This luminous wonder has made the trip to Brooklyn, where it is encased in glass, and is regularly refreshed with mist.

Van Herpen comes at fashion somewhat sideways, having been a dancer for years before she attended the ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands, and which may explain her reverence for the body. Eschewing the usual star system—and with scientists, artists, and architects in her orbit—van Herpen’s practice is extremely collaborative; many of the pieces in the collections are co-credited. In these partnerships, aesthetics are only a part of the equation, as the focus is often on material development, technical advancement, and, believe it or not, functionality. “Of course, you see a lot of collaborations in fashion that are marketing driven,” said van Herpen on a recent walkthrough of the show. “But I think here there are collaborations that try to get fashion to find new materials, find new ways of making, but also to bring in sustainability to try to change the way we work.”

“I love the collaborations that I’m having because for me the process is even more important than the end results, and the process is really an ongoing research,” she said. “It’s shaping me, it’s forming me, and, by working with people from other disciplines, you really share knowledge. [When] fashion stays within its own bubble, it’s not responding to the world. I think this exhibition is to really show the interproductiveness between philosophy, science, fashion, and art, of course.”

Visitors’ immersion into van Herpen’s world takes place within 11 themed sections. If the Met’s “Costume Art” examines the topography of the body and its organs, “Sculpting the Senses” drills down much deeper, to the molecular level, and not just of people, but of the natural world as well. The choreography of the exhibition is well done, as it travels from micro to macro, and, as Yakobosky notes, starts with the blue of water and ends with the blue of the cosmos. Along the way, he added, “you start to see relationships between different life forms.” And also between art, nature, and fashion.

In the first half of 2026, an interesting trend has emerged in the form of three exhibitions that directly pair garments and artworks. The Museum at FIT kicked things off with “Art x Fashion,” and now on display in the Met’s new Condé M. Nast Galleries is Andrew Bolton’s “Costume Art,” which opened to the public on May 10. In it, art of all kinds is paired with garments to show the centrality of the dressed body across the museum’s collections. “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” completes the triptych by including artworks, though there are many fewer than at the Met, and they are used to different ends, most often to highlight the incredible materiality of van Herpen’s work and its organic, morphing shapes.

Take, for example, a 19th-century wooden Gothic corner chair, situated near a 2011 dress inspired by Gothic European cathedrals and alchemy. Made in collaboration with architect Isaïe Bloch, the dress is constructed of copper-electroplated 3D-printed polyamide. A Naum Gabo sculpture, then, is included in the Synethesia section, while a giant fossil on loan from the American Museum of Natural History moves through time in the room dedicated to the idea of Skeletal Embodiment. Also on view is a version of van Herpen’s 3d-printed skeleton dress from 2011 which is concurrently on view at the Met, which is possible, the designer explained, because she makes copies of all pieces that leave the studio.

During the run of the show, van Herpen plans to make a dress in public. That’s one of the many interactive and dynamic elements of this exhibition, which includes moving mechanized garments, microscopes through which to peer at material samples, and many videos, including those displaying dressmaking projected on screens that unfurl from dress forms like outsized thought bubbles in the Atelier room. Further along, clips from fashion shows allow viewers to see these fantastical garments in motion.

As if that weren’t enough, there are a number of pop culture tie-ins. Beyoncé generously lent the dress van Herpen crafted for her “Renaissance” tour, and Grimes’s 2021 Met Gala look is on view, as is a Mother Mary costume the designer made for Anne Hathaway, who wore it to a premiere last month. (Made of a fabric in a red to black gradient, it features varied-sized pleats and is regal in its ocean swell of a silhouette.) If a wall of muses (photos of celebrities wearing IvH) feels self-serving, that’s a blip in a show—and a career—that is all about connections, continuity, and movement. Kismet enters in the pairing of a piece from the Brooklyn Museum’s own collection, a quasar-shaped installation of mirrored glass, Extra Life by Rob Wynne, partnered with a 2021 van Herpen dress called “Holobiont”; both are made using individually numbered pieces and a matching template. Opposite Extra Life is a section where mannequins hang from the ceiling like bats or are suspended horizontally to mimic the weightlessness of space. The curator reported that the designer had suggested working with NASA to make them levitate.

Indeed, there is a sense of airiness and openness throughout the exhibition, which is partially down to the spacious galleries, but also because many of the clothes have an exoskeletal type of construction or are designed to optimize movement. Actual or implied kineticism is also pervasive in this show; make sure to see the mechanical headpiece and the Splash dress, which is caught in an eternal moment of suspended animation.

It’s notable that both “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” and “Costume Art” are on view in the midst of the AI revolution, which has raised fears about the subsuming of the human touch to machines and algorithms. Whether or not a computer can create art is already being debated, but the body is central to our humanity, and nature is perhaps the greatest artist of all. It was interesting, then, to read that van Herpen grew up in the same area as the 16th-century painter Hieronymus Bosch, famous for The Garden of Earthly Delights (which has inspired designers from Alexander McQueen to Undercover’s Jun Takahashi). Van Herpen certainly doesn’t shy away from the darker elements of life: a section of the show is titled Mythology of Fear, and yet her work demonstrates a fearless desire to harness the power of technology to work more sustainably. Nature is often described as wild, but, the designer noted, “collaboration and symbolism are much stronger forces within nature than competition.” It’s also more powerful than a machine can ever be. It seems there’s a lot we can learn by going back to the roots of what makes us human, be that on the microscopic, corporeal, or philosophical levels. In a divided world, Van Herpen’s message is one of interconnectedness.

Water and Dreams

“Water is the origin of life, it’s where we come from. [It] comes back in different forms of my work, like the liquid shape and also the bubble forms or the crystallized shapes. You see different looks that show different qualities of water.”—Iris van Herpen

Sensory Sea Life

“We started in water, now we go into the organisms that live in the sea. A lot of these looks are really created for movement because I have a dance background and that’s also what I feel is so inspiring about the underwater world: the transformative qualities of these organisms.”—Iris van Herpen

Forces Behind the Forms

“Nature is the foundation of all the work that I’m doing, and not only its beauty, but also in terms of biomimicry, like the intelligence that is home in nature. [This section] is really about the microscopic level of the way that structure has formed in nature.”—Iris van Herpen

Atelier

“You really see my brain here in a way . . . because this is really how it starts, with experimenting on new techniques and materials. . . . There will be videos displayed that show the handwork in the atelier in real time, there’s no editing or cutting. Fashion is often displayed as fast and the real handwork is kind of a lot slower than people are used to. I’m going to create a dress live in the atelier, and I’m inviting people in the city to join me in the making process to really give that sense of time and handwork what goes into it.”—Iris van Herpen

Synethesia

“A lot of people have different senses that are mixed and I have it in a subtle way where when I hear music, I can see patterns and sometimes I use it for my design process. The works here are definitely inspired by synesthesia.”—Iris van Herpen

Skeletal Embodiment

“[Here we]go inside the body— not only the human body, but all types of bodies, from other organisms as well. And a lot of these inspirations are mixed into new hybrids, so new imaginary forms of skeletal structures.

I think if you look at our evolution, it’s equally fascinating how we have transformed and how we have been formed through evolution. And I think this room is really about our connection to the other organisms that we come from. We tend to think as humans to be very separate as a species, but of course we’re not.”—Iris van Herpen

Mythology of Fear

“This room references a lot of mythological stories that have been an inspiration to me throughout the years; some of the darker references in my work.”—Iris van Herpen

Growth Systems

“A lot of the looks that you see here are inspired by a book called Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake which explains the beauty of the underground networks that are like huge communication systems. They also refer to it as the Wood Wide Web, so it’s like the natural form of our internet. We are above ground, and we see all these things above, but there’s all this information happening that we don’t see.”—Iris van Herpen

Cabinet of Curiosities

“You’re in my thought process here, like all the inspiration—the shoes and the hats and the mannequins. You can see time lapse videos from the atelier on how the handwork is being done, and [others of] dance collaborations I’ve done.”—Iris van Herpen

Cosmic Bloom

“[In this work by the Japanese collective called Collective Night], you are seeing magnifying glasses in different directions, so when you look into it you see the space behind it in a different way. [The section with the hanging mannequins] is like the falling gravity in the cosmos here.”—Iris van Herpen

New Nature

“I think nature is always in transformation, so some of the looks are my imagination of the next decades or maybe centuries in nature.”—Iris van Herpen

“Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, May 16 - December 6, 2026.