Oscar Wilde once said: “One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.” The upcoming Iris van Herpen exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum reveals that, for the Dutch couturier, Wilde’s two options have long been inseparable.
The show brings together more than 140 haute couture looks by Van Herpen, who founded her fashion house in 2007 and quickly carved out a distinct place in the field through her wholehearted embrace of technology. One of the first designers to adopt 3D printing as a construction technique, she has also developed unconventional materials ranging from upcycled marine debris to fermented fibres. The resulting garments take their cues from fractals and tessellations to transform not only the wearer’s body but also the space around it.
This interdisciplinary sensibility shapes this show. The touring exhibition originated at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs before travelling to Queensland, Singapore and Rotterdam. Displayed alongside Van Herpen’s designs are works of contemporary art and design, scientific objects and natural-history specimens.
Owing to shipping restrictions, the natural-history materials had to be sourced locally at each venue. The Brooklyn version, curated by Matthew Yokobosky, features works from the museum’s own encyclopaedic holdings alongside specimens from the American Museum of Natural History, the Staten Island Museum and the Yale Peabody Museum. The former category includes objects from Papua New Guinea and Niue, as well as rare books—such as an 18th-century Dutch translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that informed Van Herpen’s autumn 2022 Meta Morphism collection.
In many of Van Herpen’s designs, nature becomes an active collaborator. A look from the Sympoiesis collection, for instance, was made in concert with the biodesigner Chris Bellamy and the University of Amsterdam using 125 million living bioluminescent algae. Van Herpen describes the piece as both “very challenging” and one of her “most personal” collaborations.
“Caring for this garment requires a symbiotic relationship and has redefined my creation processes entirely, as the garment is cultivated rather than constructed,” she tells The Art Newspaper. “It shows my envisioned future, where human design is not just inspired by nature but integrated with it.”
The exhibition also expands the dialogue between couture and contemporary art. For example, Van Herpen says that James Turrell’s work mirrors her interest in “the body as a site of heightened sensory experience”. Yokobosky compares Van Herpen’s practice to works like Wim Delvoye’s Nautilus Penta (2014) for its architectural complexity and Tara Donovan’s material transformations. “These artists form a kind of constellation within which Van Herpen’s work can be understood as part of a larger ecosystem of contemporary thought and experimentation,” he says.
That spirit of enquiry culminates in the re-creation of Van Herpen’s atelier, which maps the range of references that feed her work—from science and mathematics to poetry and philosophy.
Museum presentations have long been central to Van Herpen’s practice, beginning with her first institutional solo show at the Groninger Museum in 2012. It travelled to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, inaugurating both institutions into showing contemporary fashion.
“To me, couture, like dance, is a very personal expression about the transformation of the body,” Van Herpen says. “This holistic approach is what I believe encourages museums that have not previously exhibited fashion to reconsider.”
For Yokobosky, his museum’s iteration also reflects a broader shift in institutional practice “away from rigid categories and towards more fluid, cross-disciplinary narratives”. Fashion, he argues, is a particularly potent vehicle for that approach, because it “operates at the intersection of art, science, design and the body”.
Or, as Van Herpen puts it: “My intention was never to create a fashion exhibition, but a new space where the boundaries between garment, body and space begin to dissolve.” At the Brooklyn Museum, that dissolution leaves the residue of new possibilities.
- Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, Brooklyn Museum, 16 May-6 December
