Spend enough time at a fashion show, and you’ll start to hear a certain type of conversation. “I’ll wear that,” someone says. Or, as is often the case, “How can you sit through something like that?” These observations are not accidental. It reveals fashion’s unique ability to draw audiences into a dialogue about the body, taste, and objects themselves. Everyone is wearing clothes. Everyone has an opinion. This shared familiarity partly helps explain the enduring appeal of fashion fairs. But it also points to something more compelling. At their best, these exhibitions aren’t just about glamour, celebrities or beauty. They are spaces where ideas are tested – about materials, the body, technology, and what “nature” even means today.
What visitors bring with them is important. They arrive shaped by knowledge and experience, but also by something more intuitive, a kind of primitive understanding of the world. For example, across cultures and centuries, people have looked to gold and associated it with the sun. In a world before the scientific mind, it was believed that gold was formed where sunlight and…
A museum does something that a catwalk, a store, or a magazine cannot do: it slows down fashion. It creates the conditions for sustained research – for paying attention – and for putting “appearances” in relation to other disciplines: design, history and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics). In this slow space, small ideas can take root. The museum inherits fashion the moment it loses its living body. On the runway, clothes move, animated by the gesture, the presence, and the energy of the model. In the exhibition, this body disappears. However, what replaces it is not absence, but possibility: the opportunity to build new contexts, new relationships, and new ways of seeing.
in “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses“(Brooklyn Museum, opening May 16, 2026), this shift becomes particularly evident. At the center of the exhibition is The Alchemical Atelier, a museum-scale evocation of the designer’s studio in Amsterdam. Walls lined with material samples, microscopes that reveal hidden structures, and processed drawings and videos that demystify manufacturing techniques draw visitors into a space of experimentation. At its core is Craftolution, a newly commissioned installation that amplifies the smallest objects. Nods to high fashion — The merging of materials and the complexity of decoration – in something immersive, almost architectural, what is normally invisible becomes a kind of monumental performance.
While Van Herpen’s work is often associated with advanced technologies – 3D printing, laser cutting, artificial manufacturing – what is shown here is not a departure from tradition but rather a continuation of it. Her work moves seamlessly across high fashion, biology, digital design and engineering. It asks us to see the body differently: not as a static object, but as dynamic, porous, and evolving.
Van Herpen’s fascination with natural forms—the trees and waterways of her Wammell childhood, insects, cellular structures—never seems distant or abstract; It feels alive. When placed in dialogue with scientific models and specimens, her work expands beyond fashion to a broader inquiry: how we understand life itself – through memory, intuition and acquired knowledge alike.
We all have those moments, when an image or sound flips a switch in the mind. Museums quietly organize such meetings. Creating an exhibition like Sculpture of the Senses is not just about collecting objects. It is the construction of relationships and the introduction of moods, the design of a passage through hand and machine work, microscopic structures and cosmic forms, natural phenomena and manufactured materials.
At the Brooklyn Museum, this approach has precedent. A 2012 installation, “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” brought works from the museum’s collection into dialogue, encouraging visitors to draw cross-historical and cross-cultural connections. More recently, the “Solid Gold” exhibition, which celebrates the museum’s bicentenary, expands this logic, bringing fashion into dialogue with the collection to illuminate new combinations across time, materials and meaning. The structure of Sculpture of the Senses reflects this way of thinking. Moving through 11 thematic sections, the exhibition progresses like a journey, tracing a path from hidden biological structures to contemplative skins of the future.
What matters is not just what is shown, but how it unfolds, how one encounter leads to another, and how meaning accumulates. Information alone rarely becomes memory. Passion does. In “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams” (2021-22), what many visitors remember is not a single look, but a feeling: the progression through space, the crescendo of colour, the infinite mirrored room, the final ballroom of gowns suspended in light and sound. The exhibition is designed toward an experience that lasts long after visitors have left.
Not all experiences now described as “immersive” are created equal. The term has expanded to include everything from museum exhibitions to trade shows that replace objects with images. Museums work differently. Their authority – and responsibility – lies in working with real objects that occupy space and carry history. In an age shaped by screens, the museum offers something increasingly rare: time, space and dimension. What appears on the screen is flat. Fashion is not like that. The clothes are sculptural. They must be encountered in the round, understood through movement, proximity, and presence.
Fashion fairs are often underrated. However, at their best they do more than simply display what has been worn. It expands the way we see by connecting the intimate scale of the body to larger systems of knowledge, from the microscopic to the cosmic. In doing so, they remind us that what we wear is never superficial. It is a way of thinking about ourselves in the world.
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