“When Fashion Stays in Its Own Bubble, It’s Not Responding To The World”: Iris van Herpen Gets a Retrospective in Brooklyn

Reported by Vogue.

There's a bubble dress at the entrance of the Brooklyn Museum's new exhibition, and it blows actual bubbles. It's the 2016 original — the precursor to the 2026 version Eileen Gu wore to the Met Gala last week, the one that broke the internet. As an opening statement, it tells you everything: Iris van Herpen has been doing this for nearly two decades, and fashion still hasn't caught up.

"Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses" opens May 16 at the Brooklyn Museum, adapted from the 2023 Musée des Arts Décoratifs show organized by Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis, and reworked for New York by senior curator Matthew Yokobosky and Imani Williford. Yokobosky frames it as a mid-career retrospective — van Herpen's 19th year in business, her first major U.S. survey. Across 11 thematic sections, according to Vogue, the show travels from the molecular to the cosmic, opening in water's blue and closing in the blue of deep space.

Fashion That Actually Talks to the World

Van Herpen came to design through dance, then studied at the ArtEZ University of the Arts in the Netherlands — a trajectory that explains her obsession with the body in motion and her allergy to fashion's more self-enclosed tendencies. She works with scientists, architects, and artists, and co-credits her collaborators; this is not a marketing exercise. The results include 3D-printed copper-electroplated gowns, mycelium lace, and — on view in Brooklyn, misted regularly to stay alive — a dress made of 125 million bioluminescent algae. "When fashion stays within its own bubble, it's not responding to the world," she said during a walkthrough of the show. The irony of that quote landing next to an actual bubble dress is not lost.

The exhibition doesn't just display clothes — it activates them. Mechanized garments move on their own. Microscopes let visitors examine material samples up close. Mannequins hang from the ceiling like they're caught in zero gravity (van Herpen reportedly suggested asking NASA to actually levitate them). Beyoncé lent the gown she wore on the Renaissance tour. Grimes's 2021 Met Gala look is here, as is the architectural red-to-black pleated piece Anne Hathaway wore to a premiere last month. A 3D-printed skeleton dress from 2011 appears simultaneously in this show and at the Met — possible because van Herpen keeps copies of everything that leaves her studio. The Splash dress is frozen mid-motion. A Gothic cathedral-inspired gown from 2011, made in collaboration with architect Isaïe Bloch, faces a 19th-century wooden Gothic chair. The curatorial logic is rigorous: nothing is decorative for its own sake.

"Sculpting the Senses" lands as part of a larger 2026 moment — the Museum at FIT's "Art x Fashion" and Andrew Bolton's "Costume Art" at the Met complete what is now, effectively, a triptych of exhibitions reconsidering what a garment can be and do. Van Herpen's answer has always been: more than you think. In an era genuinely anxious about AI swallowing creativity whole, her work — grown from collaboration, rooted in nature, obsessed with material intelligence — argues that the most advanced technology is still, stubbornly, biological.

Van Herpen's retrospective is less a career highlight reel than a reminder that fashion's most radical move right now is paying attention to something other than itself.

Read the original at Vogue.