View Iris van Herpen’s Edgy Designs At The Brooklyn Museum

Gaga, Beyoncé, SJP. These OG influencers have all worn the avant-garde gowns by Iris van Herpen, the Dutch fashion designer who’s made a name for herself over the past decade fusing such technology as 3D printing with traditional haute-couture tailoring. But that’s not the only accomplishment giving her bold-face status. Van Herpen’s “Sculpting the Senses” exhibition, showcasing more than 140 of her creations, has been on a blockbuster world tour—France, Australia, Singapore, the Netherlands—that’s about to make its U.S. debut, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

It will be the largest of the presentations, situating van Herpen’s work amid a range of cross-disciplinary output—pieces from the Brooklyn’s contemporary and decorative arts collections, along with loans like coral, butterflies, and weevils from the American Museum of Natural History, Yale Peabody Museum, and Staten Island Museum, all of which reflect the inspirations behind the designer’s dresses—and featuring Craftolution, her new video installation, which will be projected onto 25-foot-high swaths of fabric and on view for the first time. In another first, on May 11, days before “Sculpting the Senses” bows, van Herpen will be the honoree at the museum’s annual Brooklyn Artists Ball.