In 2010, Iris van Herpen, only three years after establishing her eponymous couture brand, sent the first 3D-printed garment down the runway as part of her “Crystallization” collection. A top evoking the skeletal structure of a snake with its ivory-colored coils of 3D-printed polyamide, the piece was a collaboration with British architect Daniel Widrig.
“It was a big moment,” says van Herpen, 41, as she contemplates the look on a form in the Brooklyn Museum galleries. “And it was definitely a starting point for me to collaborate with architects on new techniques.”
At the time, 3D printing was mostly the purview of architecture and engineers. Van Herpen was the first designer to utilize the technology for a wearable garment. More than 15 years later, she has continued to push the boundaries of material and technique, collaborating with architects, sculptors, chemists, multidisciplinary artists, bioengineers and astrophysicists. That evolution — and her many inspirations — is the subject of the mid-career retrospective, “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses,” opening Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum. The show originated in 2023 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, which acquired the aforementioned 3D printed top in 2018, and has since traveled to Australia, Singapore and Rotterdam, Netherlands.
The Brooklyn Museum’s iteration is organized by Matthew Yokobosky, the institution’s senior curator of fashion and material culture, with Imani Williford, curatorial assistant, photography, fashion and material culture, and is augmented with new works drawn from the museum’s collections in American, Asian, contemporary and feminist art as well as scientific artifacts and natural history specimens including coral, fossils and skeletons. Dutch composer and music producer Salvador Breed, van Herpen’s life partner who also curates the music for her runway shows, composed the soundscape.
Van Herpen’s groundbreaking work fuses traditional craftsmanship with technological innovation, transforming fashion into a meditation on the complexity of science and nature in a rapidly evolving world. Organized around eleven themes, “Sculpting the Senses” is an immersive exploration of van Herpen’s boundless curiosity and eclectic interests, from mathematics, astronomy and neuroscience to marine biology, paleontology, mycology and mineralogy.
The Brooklyn Museum exhibition features several new pieces from van Herpen, including the crimson plissé gown that she created for Anne Hathaway’s pop star character in the film “Mother Mary” and the algae dress from the designer’s 2025 “Sympoiesis” collection. A collaboration with biodesigner Chris Bellamy and researchers at the University of Amsterdam, the dress has the look of pillowy luminescent lace and is constructed from 125 million living algae, which emit light in response to movement. It was grown in seawater baths over several months and is on view in an environmentally controlled chamber.
“I take a lot of inspiration from nature, but this was really a next step where it was about collaborating with nature,” van Herpen explains.
The exhibition contains many of the pieces worn by van Herpen’s celebrity clients including multiple looks worn by Lady Gaga, the iconic snake dress worn by Björk at the 2012 Roskilde Festival in Denmark and the Heliosphere dress, a custom look for Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s 2023 “Renaissance” tour performances in Amsterdam.
Also on view is the first iteration of van Herpen’s bubble dress, from 2016’s “Seijaku” collection. A collaboration with Tokyo-based studio A.A. Murakami, the dress features 15,000 hand-formed iridescent glass bubbles, each hand-adjusted and individually bonded in place with UV light. (Olympian Eileen Gu wore a custom version of the bubble dress to this year’s Met Gala.) The dress is meant to float on the body with the bubbles evoking the airy ballet of soap bubbles.
“If you look at our atoms, they’re 99.9 percent empty space,” van Herpen says. “I’m fascinated by the atomic reality of our bodies; scientists give such an interesting perspective on who we are. I think art is doing the same thing, and that’s why I’m bringing art and science and philosophy all together into my work.”
Pioneering scientific texts are on display throughout the exhibition, including lithographs from German zoologist Ernst Haeckel’s 1904 masterpiece “Art Forms of Nature” and several hand-drawn renderings of the brain by Santiago Ramón y Cajal. Considered the father of modern neuroscience, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1906. The Haeckel drawings are on loan from the American Museum of Natural History, as are many physical specimens, including sea corals and several dinosaur fossils; there is a baby Protoceratops, dating from 80 million years ago, and a Pellecrinus (commonly known as a Sea Lily) preserved in limestone from 345 million years ago.
More contemporary ephemera include Chinese artist Ren Ri’s honey bee sculpture “Yuansu Series II.” The bees constructed their hive along hexagonal structures placed inside a translucent box. “I have been beekeeping myself since a year, and it’s really fascinating to see how some creatures in nature are really like architects themselves,” van Herpen says. “They are such good sculptors.”
The piece is shown next to van Herpen’s honeycombed Radiography dress (2014’s “Magnetic Motion” collection), a collaboration with Canadian architect Philip Beesley made of laser-cut and heat-molded PETG, which is a 3D-printing thermoplastic.
A sculpture of Asian Fawn Tarantula webs inside 20 stacked acrylic boxes, which were created by ecologic Studio, is flanked by pieces that look as if they were indeed spun by spiders, including the Argiope Dress from the 2016 “Lucid” collection. Inspired by the orb webs of the genus Argiope, the dress is constructed of 3D-printed ABS polyurethane, which is hand-sewn onto black silk, seemingly encasing the body in a cocoon of delicate webbing.
Van Herpen’s collaborations with the late artist and former NASA engineer Kim Keever — whose large-scale photographs of liquid clouds of color were an inspiration for her 2019 “Shift Souls” collection — is augmented by Rob Wynne’s enormous glass installation sculpture “Extra Life,” which in this context, conjures the swirl of the Milky Way. A late 19th-century Polynesian tiputa (poncho) crafted from barkcloth and featuring geometric Niuean pattering, is shown among looks that conjure the underground root systems of plants, including the Genesis dress from 2022’s “Meta Morphism” collection, an intricately draped column gown made from banana leaves. Toni Costa’s opt art piece “Visual Dynamics” is perfectly compatible with the illusory effect of van Herpen’s Data Dust Kimono Dress from 2018’s “Ludi Naturae” collection. An untitled Mylar sculpture by American artist Tara Donovan that evokes metallic mushroom spores is juxtaposed with van Herpen’s Syntopia dress from 2018’s “Syntopia” collection, which is constructed of silk organza, laser cut crepe, Mylar and stainless steel.
They are among the 15 works from the museum’s permanent collection. The museum also explores van Herpen’s creative process with a recreation of her atelier in the fifth-floor rotunda where videos of the construction of the garments are projected onto giant spools of fabric extending from dress forms to the rotunda’s ceiling.
“When we started the process, Iris came and spent a whole day with us in the storerooms,” Yokobosky recalls. “Before Iris arrived, I had images in my head of pieces in the collection. And then before I even sent them to her, she had gone and done her own research. So I think we have these beautiful moments of synergy between our collection and Iris work.”
“Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” runs through Dec. 6.
