Iris van Herpen Has Spent 20 Years Asking Whether Fashion Has to Behave Like Clothing

At the Brooklyn Museum, more than 140 of Iris van Herpen's couture creations sit among fossils, skeletons, scientific specimens and contemporary art

There is a strange question hanging over almost any major fashion exhibition: are we looking at clothes or are we looking at art? Museums have spent decades making the case for fashion's cultural importance, while fashion has become increasingly comfortable borrowing the language, spaces and institutional credibility of art. Iris van Herpen makes the question feel almost obsolete. For nearly 20 years, her work has behaved as though the boundaries between fashion, sculpture, biology, architecture and engineering were never particularly useful in the first place.

That becomes unusually clear in Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, now at the Brooklyn Museum. More than 140 haute couture creations are presented alongside contemporary artworks, scientific artifacts and natural-history specimens including coral, fossils and skeletons. The exhibition moves through 11 thematic sections from the microscopic to the cosmic, examining water, anatomy, movement, sound, light, mathematics and the relationship between the human body and the natural world. This isn't simply contextual decoration placed around spectacular dresses. Much of it represents the actual territory from which Van Herpen's work has emerged.

That distinction matters. Fashion has become extremely comfortable describing itself as interdisciplinary, but often the collaboration comes after the product: an artist makes a campaign, an architect designs a store, a filmmaker creates the launch video. Van Herpen's practice works differently. Architects, scientists, artists, engineers and material researchers frequently enter the process before anyone knows exactly what the finished garment will become. The collaboration is not packaging. It is part of the method.

Her career has repeatedly produced objects that stretch the definition of a dress. In 2010, only three years after founding her house, Van Herpen sent one of fashion's earliest 3D-printed garments down a runway. Since then she has worked with laser cutting, magnetic materials, silicone, kinetic mechanisms, unconventional fabrication and experimental textiles. She has created mycelium lace and, more recently, a living dress containing millions of bioluminescent algae. At Brooklyn, that garment has to be kept inside glass and regularly misted to keep its living material functioning.

At some point, asking whether this is technically fashion begins to seem like the least interesting question available.

THE BODY IS STILL THE POINT

For all the technology surrounding Van Herpen's work, the clothes rarely feel like demonstrations of technology for its own sake. Her fascination remains stubbornly physical. She trained as a dancer before studying fashion, and movement has remained central to her practice: how material expands around a body, how a silhouette changes as someone walks, how something rigid can appear liquid and how a garment can make visible forces that ordinarily cannot be seen.

The famous Skeleton dress from 2011 is an obvious example. Its 3D-printed structure extends around the body like an external anatomy, simultaneously suggesting bone, armour and some imagined evolutionary mutation. The Splash dress captures liquid in what appears to be a permanently suspended moment of impact. Elsewhere, pleating, transparent structures and intricate layers resemble membranes, cells, wings, waves and organisms whose exact species hasn't yet been discovered.

The body in Van Herpen's work is therefore rarely simply dressed. It is extended, surrounded, protected, distorted or transformed.

That puts her at odds with one of fashion's most persistent assumptions: that clothing's fundamental job is to make the body look a certain way. Even the industry's most experimental silhouettes generally return eventually to familiar concerns of proportion, desirability and wearability. Van Herpen often seems interested in a different question altogether. What else could the relationship between material and body become?

Her answer is sometimes spectacularly impractical. That isn't a weakness so much as part of the point. Couture has always occupied fashion's least practical territory, but Van Herpen pushes that freedom unusually far. If a garment does not need to solve the problem of getting dressed on Tuesday morning, it becomes available to investigate something else.

NATURE, WITHOUT THE FLOWERS

Fashion's relationship with nature has often been painfully literal. Flowers become prints. Feathers become embellishment. Leaves are embroidered onto dresses. Sustainability is announced through earthy palettes and reassuring language about natural materials.

Van Herpen's fascination with nature operates at a much stranger level. She looks at biomimicry, cellular structures, marine organisms, fungi, skeletal systems, fluid dynamics and the mathematical patterns through which living things form. Nature becomes less a collection of motifs than a set of systems worth studying. A garment can behave like an organism without looking like a flower.

That explains why fossils and coral don't feel misplaced beside the clothes at Brooklyn. Neither do scientific imaging, anatomical forms or artworks concerned with perception and space. Van Herpen's work asks viewers to look at similarities between structures that conventional categories encourage us to separate: a bone, a building, a wave, a dress, a cell, a sculpture. The exhibition's movement from ocean depths toward outer space makes that thinking physical. Human scale becomes only one scale among many. And suddenly couture looks very small.

TECHNOLOGY DOESN'T HAVE TO REPLACE THE HAND

There is another reason Van Herpen's work feels particularly relevant now. Fashion's conversation about technology has become dominated by artificial intelligence, usually framed as a contest between machine and human creativity. Either technology will liberate designers or destroy creative work; either traditional craftsmanship must be protected from it or the future demands surrendering to it.

Van Herpen has spent almost two decades demonstrating a considerably less dramatic possibility.

Technology and craft can become collaborators. Her studio combines some of the most advanced fabrication techniques available with extraordinarily labor-intensive handwork. 3D printing does not eliminate the atelier. Engineering does not make craftsmanship obsolete. New materials do not require abandoning old techniques. The technological process expands what the hand is capable of making.

It is perhaps one of the most quietly radical aspects of her career. Fashion loves declaring that something is either heritage or innovation. Van Herpen has never seemed particularly interested in choosing. Her approach to collaboration follows the same principle. Scientists and engineers are not brought in to make couture look futuristic. They allow the studio to understand materials, movement and structures it could not investigate alone. Van Herpen has described the process itself as ongoing research, arguing that fashion cannot respond meaningfully to the world if it remains trapped inside its own disciplinary bubble.

That may explain why her work still feels difficult to imitate despite its enormous visual influence. You can copy the appearance of an Iris van Herpen dress. Reproducing the system that produced it is considerably harder.

SO WHAT IS AN IRIS VAN HERPEN DRESS?

A sculpture cannot usually be worn to dinner. Architecture does not normally move with a human spine. Biology is not supposed to hang from a mannequin. Engineering rarely needs to be beautiful.

Van Herpen keeps allowing these categories to contaminate one another. And perhaps that is why a museum is such a natural environment for her work. Not because placing couture behind glass magically transforms fashion into art, but because the museum can surround the garment with the other disciplines already present inside it.

At Brooklyn, a Van Herpen dress does not have to sit politely inside the fashion department. It can exist beside a fossil, an artwork, a microscope and a scientific specimen without deciding which one it most resembles.

That feels closer to understanding what she has been doing all along. Fashion traditionally begins with the question of what we might put on the body. Iris van Herpen begins somewhere more ambitious: what the body is, how it moves through the world, what surrounds it, what it might evolve into and what materials might make that transformation visible.

Nearly 20 years into her career, perhaps the most remarkable thing is that she still hasn't completely answered those questions. She just keeps making things we continue to call dresses because we haven't invented a better word for them yet.