Iris van Herpen Brings Haute Couture to Life

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. (Photo: On White Wall/Paula Abreu Pita)

text by Hank Manning



Clothing may have originally been developed as a form of portable shelter from the elements, but at the Brooklyn Museum, over 140 garments reveal how nature can inspire fashion and how a garment might serve to connect us to, rather than separate us from, the world around us. In this way, Iris van Herpen invites us to shift our gaze to the organisms and systems we tend to overlook—because they are too small or too big, because they’re underground or under skin, or because they’re far under the ocean or off in outer space, or simply because their process of manufacturing is hidden from consumers. 

Seijaku, the first dress on display, asserts van Herpen’s persistent goal of finding harmony in chaos, looking at the whole world and attempting to find patterns. For this dress, she suspends a wave that somehow looks more calming than many of the symmetrical 3D-printed patterns that come later. Fittingly, as life on Earth began in the water, the first section (of eleven), “Water and Dreams,” reveals many ways in which movements of water—bubbles, raindrops, waterfalls—inspire her. 

 

Iris van Herpen. Living Algae Look, from the Sympoiesis collection, 2025.
Pyrocystis lunula algae, nutrient gel, H2O, silicone, silk organza, and tulle.
Collaborator: Chris Bellamy. Model: Stella Maxwell. (Photo: Molly SJ Lowe)

 

Sea life, much of it microscopic, forms an essential part of the world’s ecosystem. Van Herpen uses multidimensional modes of biomimicry; in addition to the stable appearance—shapes and colors—she also considers movement, her outfits simulating the gentle sway of coral or the rhythmic pulsations of a jellyfish. Truly merging biology and fashion, the dress Living Algae contains 150 million bioluminescent algae that light up alongside the wearer’s movement. One of the only dresses kept behind glass, it requires strict maintenance of temperature, humidity, and light cycles to keep the algae alive.

Terrestrial life motivates designs as well. Even some of our smallest neighbors—like bees and their honeycombs—and those seemingly stagnant—like trees’ root networks—form geometrically intricate and often precisely symmetrical systems. Luminous Lichen, replicating fungal networks, could also be said to resemble the wiring of a motherboard. Pioneering 3D printing in 2010, the Crystallization moved skeletons from beneath the skin to above it. 

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. (Photo: On White Wall/Paula Abreu Pita)

Van Herpen explores the diversity within and across human minds. In “Synesthesia,” she intimates the intertwining of senses by visually representing sound waves. She appropriates mythology, rendering gowns in the forms of metal snakes or items in Bosch paintings. Towards the end of the show, she considers how humans will continue to evolve, with biotechnology and extraterrestrial exploration. In “Cosmic Bloom,” some mannequins hang upside down or sideways to consider the opportunities of fashion in environments with little or no gravity, though the exhibition does not approximate how these billowing dresses would move in outer space. 

Throughout, artwork and scientific artifacts complement the dresses, challenging how we categorize the work. With immobile mannequins that the viewer can walk around, the experience differs greatly from a runway show. Here, each dress is its own work of art. The slow pace, encouraged by a somewhat gloomy soundscape by Salvador Breed, van Herpen’s long-time collaborator and life partner, is juxtaposed with the inherent joie de vivre and natural inspiration within the garments; they are like fossils frozen in time.

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. (Photo: On White Wall/Paula Abreu Pita)

To be sure, these pieces are not merely museum specimens. Worn in music videos, on musical tours, and on the red carpet, they are titans of popular culture. Repeat clients include Beyoncé, Björk, and Lady Gaga—Photographs of these and other “muses” appear near the show’s end, bringing the dresses back to life and providing a second perspective on their functions. 

Van Herpen’s reorientation underscores the egocentrism of the human race, with our fixation on things of our own size, in our near vision, and on the most familiar and easily observed processes. Likewise, we often ignore the labors of others even within our species. Inside our own bodies, operations constantly persist to sustain life in our circulatory, digestive, and nervous systems. And each of us, in our minds, has innumerable new and ever-evolving worlds. Van Herpen’s designs make the invisible visible, reminding us of the complex, interlinked, and essential beauty that surrounds us, big and small, near and far. One series at a time, they impress through their novelty and eccentricity; seen in aggregate, as in Sculpting the Senses, we get a sense of awe, an almost life-affirming quality. 

Van Herpen’s boundless curiosity—her ongoing discovery of untapped sources of inspiration—complicates her stated goal of finding harmony in chaos. Although she succeeds at this in many individual dresses, the show’s increasing diversity in color, form, and source hardly feels harmonious in aggregate. But, in this multiplicity, we can easily find comfort in our place in the interconnectedness and infinite beauty of the universe, inspiring a sense of wonder about what is still to learn.  

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is on view through December 6 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. (Photo: On White Wall/Paula Abreu Pita)

Garry Winogrand: Color @ Brooklyn Museum

Garry Winogrand: Color sheds new light on the influential career of twentieth-century photographer Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) as the first exhibition dedicated to the artist’s color photographs. While almost exclusively known for his black-and-white images that pioneered a “snapshot aesthetic” in contemporary art, Winogrand also produced more than 45,000 color slides between the early 1950s and late 1960s. The exhibition features an enveloping installation of seventeen projections comprising more than 450 rarely or never- before seen color photographs that demonstrate the artist’s commitment to color, with which he experimented for nearly 20 years. Also included are 25 gelatin silver photographs drawn from the Museum’s extensive holdings of works by the artist.

Garry Winogrand: Color is on view through December 8 at Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238. photographs courtesy of Brooklyn Museum and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Soul Of A Nation: Art In the Age Of Black Power Opens @ Brooklyn Museum

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power shines light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history. Black artists across the country worked in communities, in collectives, and individually to create a range of art responsive to the moment-including figurative and abstract painting, prints, and photography; assemblage and sculpture; and performance. The exhibition is on view from September 14 through February 3 at Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway Brooklyn, New York

Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller Opens Today @ The Brooklyn Museum in New York

In Iggy Pop Life Class, Turner Prize–winning artist Jeremy Deller used the traditional life drawing class to stage a performative event with Iggy Pop as model and subject. The exhibition, opening today at Brooklyn Museum, presents the resulting drawings along with works from historical collections, chosen by Deller, that depict the male body, examining shifting representations of masculinity throughout history. The fifty-three drawings included in the exhibition were created on February 21, 2016, during a one-day life drawing class, using Pop as the unexpected model. The class was held at the New York Academy of Art and included twenty-two artists drawn from New York City’s diverse communities, ranging in age from 19 to 80, with varying backgrounds and levels of education and experience. The class was led by artist and drawing professor Michael Grimaldi. Jeremy Deller "Iggy Pop Life Class" will be on view from November 4, 2016 to March 26, 2017 at Brooklyn Museum in New York. photograph by Elena Olivo

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties

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How did American artists represent the Jazz Age? The exhibition Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties at the Brooklyn Museum brings together for the first time the work of sixty-eight painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new mode of modern realism in the years bounded by the aftermath of the Great War and the onset of the Great Depression. Throughout the 1920s, artists created images of liberated modern bodies and the changing urban-industrial environment with an eye toward ideal form and ordered clarity—qualities seemingly at odds with a riotous decade best remembered for its flappers and Fords. Artists took as their subjects uninhibited nudes and close-up portraits that celebrated sexual freedom and visual intimacy, as if in defiance of the restrictive routines of automated labor and the stresses of modern urban life. Reserving judgment on the ultimate effects of machine culture on the individual, they distilled cities and factories into pristine geometric compositions that appear silent and uninhabited. American artists of the Jazz Age struggled to express the experience of a dramatically remade modern world, demonstrating their faith in the potentiality of youth and in the sustaining value of beauty. Youth and Beauty will present 140 works by artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Imogen Cunningham, Charles Demuth, Aaron Douglas, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Luigi Lucioni, Gerald Murphy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.  Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties is on view until January 29, 2012 at the Brooklyn Museum. 

Gathered

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Lorna Simpson: Gathered presents works that explore this Brooklyn-born artist’s interest in the interplay between fact and fiction, identity and history. Through works that incorporate hundreds of original and found vintage photographs of African Americans that she collects from eBay and flea markets, Lorna Simpson undermines the assumption that archival materials are objective documents of history. The exhibition also includes examples of Simpson’s series of installations of black-and-white photo-booth portraits of African Americans from the Jim Crow era and a film work. On view until August 21, 2011 at the Brooklyn Museum.