Inside the Iris Van Herpen Brooklyn Museum Debut

Exploring Iris van Herpen’s Brooklyn Museum debut: Sculpting the Senses.

If you’ve never seen an Iris van Herpen gown in action, I encourage you to watch a video–really, any video–of her surreal, dream-like fashion that seamlessly merges art, technology, and materiality in a way that has truly never been done before. Her work on its own is spectacular, but it comes to life in such a satisfying way on the body. Most creatives might tell you they get inspiration from other artists, cultural moments, or taking a walk by the Seine. But at the press preview for the new Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses show at the Brooklyn Museum, the designer told us she goes to CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory near Geneva, to talk to scientists about new materials when she’s looking for inspiration. That’s just the kind of designer she is.

So it’s no surprise that Sculpting the Senses brings together over 140 of Iris van Herpen’s experimental garments alongside works by the designer’s artistic collaborators, including Nick Knight, Philip Beesley, Rogan Brown, Casey Curran and Kim Keever, plus examples from nature as far-ranging as dinosaur fossils on loan from the American Museum of Natural History to hulking pieces of coral. The show is divided up into 11 different themes like Water and Dreams, Sensory Sea Life, Cabinet of Curiosities and Skeletal Embodiment. But the highlight is the Cosmic Bloom room; a darkened space full of mannequins askew at all angles, hanging from the ceiling, posing, wearing bold, surreally vivid colorful gowns. “To me the cosmos also symbolizes creative freedom,” Van Herpen said.