What does one do after creating some of the most unsettlingly alive-looking garments ever made? Take them on a world tour. At the Brooklyn Museum, couture learns basic biology all while hosting what may very well be the world’s most expensive sea creatures, which could only mean one thing. “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” has officially reached its final stop in New York, after visiting Paris, Australia, Singapore and Rotterdam. Good news for the museum staff: the exhibition stops just short of actual life forms. For the most part, at least.
The retrospective, curated by Matthew Yokobosky with the assistance of Imani Williford, brings together more than 100 pieces reflecting on Van Herpen’s background (she grew up in the small Dutch village of Wamel). Years of ballet and a childhood close to nature turned van Herpen into the kind of designer who treats the human body like a sculpture mid-metamorphosis. Split into nine sections, the retrospective maps out Van Herpen’s world, where couture is usually forced to make friends with science, technology, and contemporary art.
Walk in and you’ll find yourself staring at “the living dress,” a collaboration with Chris Bellamy borrowed from the Sympoiesis collection, made from roughly 125 million bioluminescent algae, responsible for its radiating blue glow. Or Eileen Gu’s Met Gala look, a dress covered in thousands of crystalline glass spheres and equipped with actual bubble-generating technology, first introduced in 2016, now reworked with help from A.A. Murakami. Or a 2011 dress referencing Gothic cathedrals and alchemy, made with architect Isaïe Bloch, constructed from copper-electroplated 3D-printed polyamide. Maybe even the “skeleton dress” from the same year that established her early reputation, sitting next to a fossil borrowed from the American Museum of Natural History. Van Herpen takes her collaborators seriously. So does her imagination.
