Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses

A landmark retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum.

The Brooklyn Museum presents the first major American retrospective of Dutch couturier Iris van Herpen, bringing together 140 haute couture creations alongside works from the museum’s permanent collection, natural history specimens, and new commissions. On view through December 6, 2026.

“Sculpting the Senses” is van Herpen’s first substantial American showing, and the most expansive iteration of a traveling exhibition that launched at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2023. Organized across eleven themed chapters — moving from water to cosmos, with stops at anatomy, fear, growth, and flight — the presentation places her garments in dialogue with fossils from the American Museum of Natural History, specimens from the Yale Peabody Museum, and works from the Brooklyn Museum’s own collection. Facebook

At the entrance, visitors encounter the Seijaku dress (2016), its surface covered in glass bubbles, positioned before a frozen wave by the artist collective 目 (Mé). Van Herpen pushed for the garments to be displayed unusually close to viewers — close enough to touch — making the encounter feel less like a museum visit than a physical conversation.

The exhibition traces over two decades of practice, from early heat-treated PETG experiments to the Living Algae look (2025), created with biodesigner Chris Bellamy from 125 million Pyrocystis lunula algae cultivated in seawater baths — a piece that emits light when the wearer moves, alive inside a misted glass case. Also making its debut is Weightlessness of the Unknown (2024), an aerial sculpture conceived during the artist’s process of revisiting her own archive.

The exhibition was curated with Matthew Yokobosky and Imani Williford, and includes pieces worn by Beyoncé, Björk, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Cate Blanchett. Van Herpen has described the months spent combing through the Amsterdam atelier archives as “like going through my diary.”