Iris Van Herpen Brings Living Systems Into Couture
At a moment when design is increasingly shifting away from rigid functionality toward emotion, tactility, and embodied experience, ‘Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’ proposes fashion as a living, responsive system. Presented at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition explores how softness can operate not as fragility, but as a transformative force – one that dissolves boundaries between body, technology, nature, and imagination.
Moving between microscopic and cosmic scales, the designer’s work invites visitors into an environment where fashion becomes a medium for empathy, transformation, and perception. Water, air, anatomy, and energy recur throughout the show, emphasizing the porous relationship between the human body and its surrounding ecosystems. In this context, softness emerges as both an aesthetic language and a conceptual framework – suggesting adaptability, vulnerability, and mutual dependence in a rapidly changing world.
Originally developed by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and now making its North American debut at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition will be on view from May 16th until December 6th, 2026, and positions van Herpen’s practice at the intersection of couture craftsmanship, speculative design, and sensory experimentation. Rather than presenting fashion as spectacle alone, it becomes a way of feeling through the future.
Henosis Dress, ‘Roots of Rebirth’ collection, 2021, Iris Van Herpen Atelier. all images © designboom
from the microscopic world toward the macroscopic
Bringing together more than 140 haute couture looks alongside contemporary art, scientific artifacts, and immersive installations, the show traces the designer’s fascination with fluidity, movement, and interconnectedness. Her garments appear less like static objects and more like evolving organisms: translucent skins, kinetic structures, and delicate forms that seem to breathe, ripple, or grow. Through experimental materials, biomorphic silhouettes, and collaborations across science and art, van Herpen reimagines couture as something deeply sensory and relational rather than purely ornamental.
The show is organized by the natural themes from which the Dutch designer draws her inspiration. It opens with water, which she describes as ‘the origin of life’. ‘It’s the most vital material that we have on our planet,’ she notes. From there, the galleries move from the microscopic world toward the macroscopic, building a sequence that links cellular life, marine structures, anatomy, consciousness, and planetary scale. This movement gives the show a loose rhythm of expansion, with each room enlarging the body’s sense of where design can begin.
This is where Iris Van Herpen feels especially aligned with the theme of Radical Softness. Her work treats the body as part of a larger ecology, shaped by water, air, sound, dreams, and mineral growth. ‘The essence of my work is about finding that deeper connection with nature,’ she continues, ‘and feeling like we are a part of something much bigger, like the interconnectedness of all the layers of life.’
The garments translate that thought without heavy explanation. They hover around the figure, branch across the torso, lift away from the skin, and suggest that dressing can be an act of sensing one’s place inside a wider field.
Seijaku Dress, from ‘Seijaku’ collection, 2016, Iris Van Herpen Atelier
Couture as a state of attention
Across the exhibition, Van Herpen’s silhouettes appear almost weightless, yet the processes behind them are intensely physical. During the walkthrough, she spoke about beginning with material before silhouette.
‘When I start working on a collection, I often start working on the materials first,’ she explains. ‘Before I even start thinking about silhouette or movement, I start from the material.’ That order matters, as the garments feel grown from material behavior, with their forms emerging through bending, layering, cutting, stitching, and digital translation.
The Brooklyn Museum presentation includes more than 140 haute couture creations shown alongside contemporary art, design objects, scientific artifacts, and natural history specimens, including coral, fossils, and skeletons.
The show also includes an evocation of Van Herpen’s atelier, opening up the tactile side of couture creation within a broader exhibition about science and the body in space. Here, material studies and swatches backdrop physical scale models, and visitors are invited to peer through microscopes to take a close look at the designer’s otherworldly inspirations for themselves.
Skeleton Dress, from the ‘Capriole’ collection, 2011, Iris Van Herpen Atelier
Handwork and time
Van Herpen’s process brings older couture techniques into contact with digital tools, new materials, and experimental fabrication. She spoke about the history of handcraft with real affection, describing couture as an evolving language. For her, historic techniques gain new energy when they meet present-day tools and materials. The dialogue gives couture a sense of continuation, where skill moves forward through use.
That idea came through most directly when she described handwork as a meditative state. ‘I create my best work when I’m doing handcraft myself,’ she says. ‘It works really well when I’m in the process of making because time slows down and you get a clearer mind.’
In the galleries, that slowing is visible in the surfaces. Some pieces carry the precision of scientific imaging, while others seem shaped by breath or current. The softness here is disciplined, built through repetition and attention instead of looseness.
R-Evoluzione, 2014, Enrico Ferrarini (left). Bene Gesserit Gown, custom look for Grimes, 2021, Iris Van Herpen Atelier (right)
Dreaming as a design tool
The exhibition also traces Van Herpen’s interest in altered perception. She spoke about meditation, lucid dreaming, hypnosis, and a light form of synesthesia, where music can appear to her as pattern. Those experiences enter the work as practical design tools.
‘I use lucid dreaming as a tool to explore patterns that I translate into garments later,’ she tells us. In that sense, the dream is handled with studio rigor. It becomes a way to test movement, surface, and structure before they enter material form.
This gives Iris Van Herpen’s work a particular intimacy. The garments may rely on advanced fabrication, yet they often begin with interior experience: a sound seen as pattern, a dream remembered as movement, a material handled until it starts suggesting its own direction. The exhibition’s soundscape by Salvador Breed deepens that field as it surrounds the garments with a sensory layer that makes perception part of the display.
Hydrozoa Dress, ‘Sensory Seas’ collection, 2020 (left). Arachne Bodice, ‘Meta Morphism’ collection, 2022 (right), Iris Van Herpen Atelier
From sketch to file to garment
Van Herpen also described the technical path behind the complex patterning. The studio often begins with a physical, full-scale sketch on a base dress. That sketch is then translated into computer files, especially when embroidery needs to become a technical pattern. From there, she can digitally adjust the surface and silhouette. The process moves back and forth between hand and screen, keeping the body present even as the garment passes through software.
This back-and-forth is one of the exhibition’s most compelling design lessons. Technology appears here as a way to extend touch, instead of replacing it. Digital tools help carry a hand-drawn or physically modeled gesture into a complex surface. The final pieces hold traces of both methods, with the precision of computation and the sensitivity of couture sharing the same edge.