Iris van Herpen and the Reinvention of the Body

The Brooklyn Museum is presenting Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses — an exhibition of more than 140 haute couture creations by the celebrated fashion designer shown alongside contemporary artworks as well as scientific and natural history artifacts. Art critic and 300Magazine cofounder Julia Sysalova looks at how van Herpen’s visionary fashion brings together art, science, technology, and the natural world.

While in New York, I made it to the Brooklyn Museum to see Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses. And somewhere in the first few rooms, the word “fashion” stopped being enough to describe what I was looking at. 

Iris van Herpen is officially a fashion designer, of course. But the exhibition makes a convincing argument that her practice belongs to a much larger territory, somewhere between sculpture, architecture, biology, technology, and the study of the human body.

Born in the Netherlands in 1984, Van Herpen grew up surrounded by nature and trained in classical dance from an early age. Both experiences seem important when looking at her work today: nature gives her a vocabulary of structures and systems, while dance gives her an understanding of the body as something in constant motion. After studying fashion at ArtEZ in Arnhem, she worked with Alexander McQueen in London and textile artist Claudy Jongstra before founding her own label in 2007. In 2010, she presented her first 3D-printed garment at a moment when 3D printing in fashion still sounded more like an experiment than a serious creative tool.

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026

But technology is not really the subject of her work. What interests her is life itself: how things grow, move, breathe, repeat, mutate, and organize themselves. That becomes especially clear in Sculpting the Senses. The Brooklyn Museum presents more than 140 haute couture creations, but they do not stand alone. Van Herpen’s dresses appear beside contemporary artworks, scientific specimens, fossils, skeletons, corals, glass, ceramics, and natural forms. The exhibition originated at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2023 and has since traveled internationally; Brooklyn is its North American debut and Van Herpen’s first major New York exhibition.

This way of presenting the work changes how we see it. A dress suddenly begins to resemble a marine organism. Another seems to reproduce the branching logic of a nervous system. Layers of fabric behave like waves or air currents. Structures appear to grow around the body rather than simply cover it.

One historical reference is particularly revealing. Van Herpen has been fascinated by the nineteenth-century German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel, whose extraordinary illustrations of microscopic organisms showed that nature can produce structures more complex and visually radical than almost anything we might invent. More than a century later, Van Herpen seems to continue this fascination with the hidden architecture of life, only her laboratory is the human body.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes Van Herpen’s interdisciplinary approach as an innovative model for twenty-first-century fashion. Her sources move freely between biomimicry, fractal geometry, neuroscience, marine biology, architecture, mathematics, and digital fabrication. She has collaborated with architects, engineers, choreographers, artists, and scientists, including architect Philip Beesley, whose research into responsive environments has had a particularly strong influence on her work. And yet what impressed me most is how little the finished works feel technological, they feel alive.

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026

We live at a moment when technology is often presented as spectacle: look what the machine can do. Van Herpen reverses that relationship. The machine disappears behind the experience. Laser cutting, 3D printing, unconventional materials, and digital modeling become ways of approaching something much older than technology, that is our fascination with transformation, nature, movement, and the mystery of the body.

Perhaps this is also why musicians and performers have been drawn so strongly to her work. Lady Gaga began wearing Van Herpen as early as 2009. Björk has repeatedly commissioned her designs, including costumes for the Cornucopia tour. Beyoncé wore a custom Van Herpen creation during the Renaissance World Tour. Her work has also been worn by Cate Blanchett, Rihanna, Tilda Swinton, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lopez, Solange, Grimes, and many others.

But these collaborations are interesting for more than celebrity visibility. Van Herpen’s clothes transform the silhouette so radically that the person wearing them can seem temporarily transformed into another kind of being. This is especially powerful with performers such as Björk or Lady Gaga, whose own artistic identities have long involved the invention of alternative bodies and personas.

Installation view of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026

There is also an important historical line running through Van Herpen’s practice. Fashion has repeatedly borrowed from sculpture and architecture, from the engineered silhouettes of Charles James to the experiments of Paco Rabanne, Issey Miyake, Hussein Chalayan, and Alexander McQueen. But Van Herpen pushes this relationship further because she works at a moment when the distinction between the natural and the artificial is itself becoming unstable. A structure can be grown, printed, coded, laser-cut, hand-sewn, or modeled on the behavior of a living organism and sometimes all of these processes can exist in a single object.

Van Herpen is not simply making spectacular dresses. She is asking one of the central questions of our time, what a body means today. For decades, we were taught to think through oppositions: nature versus technology, handcraft versus machine, art versus fashion, organic versus artificial. Van Herpen seems much less interested in choosing between them. Her work suggests that these categories are already becoming obsolete. 

In her work, a body is never fixed. It extends, dissolves, grows new surfaces, develops strange membranes and protective structures. Sometimes it looks ancient; sometimes completely futuristic. And very often it is impossible to decide which. That ambiguity is where I think her importance to contemporary art becomes especially clear. 

You stop asking whether what you are looking at is a dress, a sculpture, an experiment, or a technological object. You simply start looking at the forms, and then you begin to notice that many of the forms we call futuristic have been present in nature for millions of years. This is why Sculpting the Senses works so well in a museum. It is a very beautiful exhibition, certainly. But more importantly, a very intelligent one.

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses
May 16–December 6, 2026
The Brooklyn Museum, New York