Iris van Herpen Finishes the Gown She Pleated With Visitors Inside Her Brooklyn Museum Show

Iris van Herpen has finished the gown she has been making in public at the Brooklyn Museum. The house said on Tuesday, November 3, that after nine days of hand-pleating and draping, the "Sculpting the Unspoken" gown had been created live inside its exhibition there, and thanked the New York visitors who took part in the pleating.

The gown was made inside Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, where the museum also lists a programme of Sculpting the (Un)Spoken performances. The show opened on May 16 and is on view on the museum's fifth floor through January 3, 2027. It includes a recreation of her atelier, where visitors could join in the handwork.

Iris van Herpen

How it was made

Visitors didn't just watch. Hyperallergic's Livia Caligor, who took part in a session this summer, described pairs of visitors pleating fabric alongside Van Herpen in the recreated atelier at the centre of the show, with the designer then working their pleats into the dress, with the Netherlands-based designer due to return to the studio at intervals through the run. Van Herpen is quoted there saying that each pair who joined her would influence the garment's DNA.

The house says the conversations count as much as the pleats: the best moments from those exchanges are to be stitched inside the dress, so it carries something of the people who helped make it. The house calls that couture as "a performance of material memory". The photos it posted show a strapless silver gown whose skirt dissolves into dozens of pleated fans and coiled tendrils in silver and grey, split at the front and pooling into a train.

Iris van Herpen

The show around it

Sculpting the Senses was organized by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where it opened in 2023, and travelled to Brisbane's QAGOMA, Singapore's ArtScience Museum and Kunsthal Rotterdam before Brooklyn, its North American debut and Van Herpen's first major New York exhibition. More than 140 of her couture pieces are shown with contemporary art and natural history specimens such as coral, fossils and skeletons. Matthew Yokobosky, the museum's senior curator of fashion and material culture, organized the Brooklyn presentation. Entry is by timed ticket.

Our read

Fashion exhibitions usually show finished clothes behind glass. This one put the making on the floor and let the public into it, which suits a designer whose name rests on process, from 3D printing to the hand-pleating here. It also leaves the Brooklyn stop of a touring retrospective with a piece made in, and partly by, the city showing it. The house hasn't said where the gown goes once the show closes in January, or whether it will be shown again; for now it's in Brooklyn.