–Jayna Rohslau
Is Mother Nature a fashion girl?
Yes. And the designer of haute couture worn to be wild: Iris Van Herpen. On display at the Brooklyn Museum, Iris Van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses offers an excursion into fashion and nature’s convergence, expanding our sartorial horizon through a retrospective of the designer’s couture paired with examples of contemporary art, specimens and technology. The exhibition opened May 16 and is on display until December 6. Here were No Kill’s takeaways from a walk down memory’s runway.
The Waves Remade
Water’s materiality is a reverential subject for Van Herpen, whether liquid, frozen, or vaporous. The designer utilizes materials ranging from blown glass and thermoformed plastics to techniques such as suminagashi, a Japanese marbling process using ink and water.
Water itself was the central subject of her 2010 collection Crystallization. Other dresses emerge from processes as eclectic and varied as metal tweezers and a hot air gun.
Metamorphic tendencies
Transformation is a theme throughout the exhibition, as Van Herpen shifts direction every season while deriving inspiration from sources in nature and other fields of art. For her 2022 collection Meta Morphism, she was inspired by Ovid’s epic. The gown Ars Amatoria derives its name from the poet’s earlier work, which begins with the evocative line, “Should anyone not know the art of love, read this.” Crafted from crepe, lace, silk organza, Mylar and crystals, the gown renders reinvention delicate, beautiful and fraught with possibility, like a pair of white lace wings.
Dune and glam
Literary influences become especially pronounced in the Bene Gesserit gown modeled on the titular figures from Frank Herbert’s science-fiction series. It was designed for Grimes to wear at the 2021 Met Gala, a metallic creation that fuses to the body. The dress features a pale bodice that incorporates three-dimensional silicone textures that have been individually cast by hand, interlaced with strands of silk organza draped and sewn by hand into the cape.
Villain arc
The Entangled Life dress from the designer’s 2021 Roots of Rebirth collection is a rapturous costume of silk organza, tulle, and wire. Suitably, it was worn by Ariana Grande and is a dramatic tangent keen to sweep through the scene of a crime or a gala, ardently inevitable.
Another notable look is the hypertube dress made from black silk-chiffon. Van Herpen drew on Hydrozoa, a class of branching marine organisms, as well as the intricate anatomical drawings of Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose studies revealed the branching architecture of the nervous system. The resulting look is intimidating, flaunting an interface of dark tubes that only a gorgon would wear out.
Biological wearability
Bioavailable resources are far more common than emotional availability and can be even more dazzling in their effect. In 2021, Iris Van Herpen began collaborating with designers Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros on biotechnologies capable of 3-D printing organic substances such as algae and mycelium. Drawing on those processes, the trio created the 2022 Singularity jumpsuit from recycled organza and cacao beans transformed into printable biopolymer filaments and electroplated in copper. The overall effect is less tin man and more gilded titaness, a certifiable legend of the cyberspace power dressing variety.
Winged behavior
Lady Gaga wore this sculptural bodice that draws on the myth of Arachne, part of the Meta Morphism collection. Its gossamer structures cast outward from the bodice, invoking Arachne’s transformation into a spider. The exhibition’s recurring references to animal life call to mind the German term Umwelt: the sensory world particular to an organism and inaccessible in its entirety to others.
Gown of eden
Iris Van Herpen was born in the village of Wamel, near the birthplace of Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. She interrogates the boundary between the human and the more-than-human, much as Bosch developed a visual language of hybrid bodies, paradise and monstrosity. The Cosmogonic Myth gown from the designer’s 2022 Meta Morphism collection is made from banana leaves, Japanese crepe de chine and tulle. It was worn by Janelle Monae to the Glass Onion premiere.
Stay illusion
For her 2019 Hypnosis collection, the designer collaborated with Philip Beesley to create a cape-dress that produces an optical illusion in the eye of the beholder. It is intended to blur the boundaries between body and garment. The dress incorporates a black kaleidoscope pattern that has been printed on fine duchesse satin.
Arch behavior
Our condolences to Hozier – taking her to church will hardly suffice when one can don her own faith in a dress. The 2012 Cathedral dress is architectural, fusing arches and buttresses in alignment with the discipline of construction. The dress was 3D-printed in polyamide and electroplated in copper to convey a finish of waxed wood that completes the look of a statuesque woman with a goddess complex.
The life aquatic
In 2025, Van Herpen isolated the voluminous shape of coral and recontextualized it onto the human form, with sumptuous results in the Phantom’s Coral Dress from her Sympoiesis collection. This ocean guise is crafted from brass wires fire-flamed into reef motifs, cotton and thermoplastic. The dress itself is a sight for starry eyes, smoky and mystifying in its asymmetrically aqueous look of constructed spontaneous combustion.
The Hydromedusa dress from the designer’s 2020 Sensory Seas collection also draws in oceanic themes, uniting dozens of digitally printed organza circles bonded by heat to laser-cut fabric dendrites. Undulating when worn, the sheer cascade of layers is intended to invoke the placid and ephemeral form of a jellyfish.
Butterfly flight risk
The highlight of the exhibition was the final room, which featured a vivid configuration of gowns that transformed nature into billowing, frothy creations that one might daydream onto one’s conception of a nymph or dryad. Some mannequins tilted sideways; others hung upside down. The arrangement recalled butterflies in formation and made a wearable chrysalis feel like a tangible wardrobe need. While I don’t typically associate insectoid and alien life forms with sex appeal, you heard and saw it here first.
Ambient noise filled the room as a video screen behind the designs displayed Van Herpen’s 2021 video Earthrise, twenty models in sculptural looks and a world-champion skydiver flying high above Italy’s Dolomite mountains. Van Herpen intended this multimedia presentation as an homage to NASA’s 1968 Earthrise photograph, as well as to send the message that one should take an elevated view of the world to protect its star-flung beauty.
The bodice electric
During a visit to the European Organization for Nuclear Research in 2014, Iris Van Herpen came across the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, which generates an electromagnetic field one hundred thousand times stronger than Earth’s. She found this notion deeply moving and this trip inspired several collections, including Magnetic Motion (2014), which explores the monumental interplay of magnetic forces on the human form to striking effect. The exhibition also features a print from the designer’s collaboration with Nick Knight to photograph the site and machinery as basis for the collection’s mythic display.
Bright city looks
Van Herpen interrogates the boundaries between nature and artifice, tracing silhouettes with what she calls the “lines of life” that conjure the structures of life forms beyond the human perspective. Looks that interrogate the future are spurred into literal motion by small motors, with flickering metallic wings and wired bodices that are uncanny—as are the unnatural forms we find all around us today, and that go unchallenged.
Suffused by influences, the exhibition coalesces into a unique vision. Van Herpen collapses the distinction between the human and the more-than-human, biology and technology. Not everything in nature has to be understood to be appreciated, but this exhibition is a scene to be believed, making perception itself feel like an act of transformation.
All Installation views of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 2026. Photograph by Paula Abreu Pita, courtesy Brooklyn Museum
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