In 2010, Iris van Herpen - then just three years into her eponymous couture house - sent the first wearable 3D-printed garment down a runway. The piece, a skeletal top evoking a snake's ribcage, was forged from ivory polyamide and co-created with British architect Daniel Widrig. At the time, 3D printing was the domain of engineers, not fashion houses. Van Herpen changed that. Fifteen years later, her mid-career retrospective, "Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses," opens at the Brooklyn Museum, tracing a journey that has since moved from polyamide to living algae and glass bubbles.
For the lingerie historian, van Herpen's work offers a provocative dialogue with the body's most intimate architecture. Her garments - whether the translucent Radiography dress (2014), laser-cut and heat-molded from thermoplastic, or the bubble dress (2016), encrusted with 15,000 hand-placed glass orbs - do not merely clothe the figure; they reimagine it as a landscape of bone, air, and light. The exhibition pairs her designs with Ernst Haeckel's 1904 lithographs of radiolarians and Santiago Ramón y Cajal's hand-drawn neural networks, underscoring that fashion, like lingerie, is always a negotiation between structure and sensation.
Van Herpen's collaborations read like a roster of avant-garde alchemists: biodesigner Chris Bellamy, whose algae dress (2025) glows with 125 million living organisms; Tokyo's A.A. Murakami, who helped suspend those glass bubbles; and the late NASA engineer Kim Keever, whose ink-cloud photographs inspired the 2019 "Shift Souls" collection. A highlight for lingerie aficionados is the Argiope Dress (2016), a 3D-printed polyurethane web hand-sewn onto black silk - a piece that feels like the ultimate corset, not of boning but of spun light.
The show runs through December 6. For those who study how fabric meets flesh, van Herpen's work is a masterclass in the erotics of invention.
Originally reported by WWD