Iris van Herpen’s Futuristic Fashion Meets Art at Brooklyn Museum Retrospective

The 2026 Met Gala became a runway for Iris van Herpen’s visionary fashion when Olympic skier Eileen Gu stepped onto the red carpet wearing a shimmering gown that appeared to be woven from thousands of iridescent soap bubbles. The dress, suspended mid-float across Gu’s body and trailing behind her, was a collaboration between van Herpen and the Tokyo-London design studio A.A.Murakami.

Assembled from 15,000 hand-formed glass bubbles and embedded with microprocessors that released real bubbles into the air as Gu moved, the gown took 2,550 hours to complete. It also served as a preview for Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, the North American debut of a retrospective exhibition opening at the Brooklyn Museum on May 16, 2026. The original 2016 bubble dress will be featured in the show.

“It represents the air that’s inside of our bodies. Over 90% of our bodies are made up of air.”
— Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture, Brooklyn Museum

Fashion as Art: Van Herpen’s Scientific Collaborations

Over the past two decades, Iris van Herpen has redefined fashion as an art form by treating science as a creative partner. Her work draws inspiration from the air in our lungs, the skeletal structure of a stingray, and the magnetic fields of the Large Hadron Collider. She has collaborated with architects, paleontologists, and biologists, using materials ranging from iron filings and magnets to bioluminescent algae.

The Brooklyn Museum has long championed fashion as art, beginning with its 1934 Story of Silk exhibition, often regarded as the start of fashion’s museum era. Since then, the museum has hosted retrospectives of iconic designers including Madame Grès, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jean Paul Gaultier, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Virgil Abloh, and Thierry Mugler. Sculpting the Senses continues this legacy by showcasing van Herpen’s boundary-pushing designs.

Water as Muse: From Bubble Dresses to Ocean Slices

The bubble dress serves as the exhibition’s centerpiece, but the show explores water in all its forms—liquid, frozen, and gaseous—as a recurring theme in van Herpen’s work. Yokobosky explains, “The show starts about different inspirations from the different forms of water, liquid, frozen, gaseous, and how all those different states have been equally informative for her as a design inspiration.”

Complementing van Herpen’s pieces is a work by the Japanese art collective Mé, described by Yokobosky as “a slice of the ocean” preserved within the gallery. Van Herpen’s fascination with water dates back to her breakthrough 2010 Crystallization collection, which explored limestone deposits, ice crystals, and the choreography of a splash. This collection also featured the first 3D-printed garment ever shown on a fashion runway—a skeletal, ivory-colored top created with British architect Daniel Widrig, now on display in Brooklyn. Depending on the angle, the piece resembles a fossilized vertebra.