Spend enough time at a fashion show, and you start to hear some kind of conversation. “I could wear that,” someone said. Or, more commonly, “How do you live in something like that?” These statements did not happen by chance. They reveal fashion’s unique ability to draw audiences into conversations—about the body, about taste and about things themselves. Everyone wears clothes; everyone has an opinion. That shared familiarity helps in part to explain the enduring appeal of fashion shows. But it also points to something more compelling. At best, these shows aren’t just about glamour, celebrity or beauty. They are spaces where ideas are tested—about materials, about the body, about technology and what “nature” means today.
What matters is the guests they bring. They come shaped by knowledge and experience, but also something understandable—a kind of understanding from the beginning of the world. For example, throughout all cultures and centuries, people have looked at gold and associated it with the sun. In the pre-scientific world, gold was believed to form where sunlight meets water, usually found in rivers and streams. Long before chemistry defined its properties, its meaning was already felt—and that perception continues. Even something as simple as a long, afternoon shadow can resonate in the work of an artist like Alberto Giacometti. Museums, at their best, open up both types of knowledge at once: what we have already heard and what we have just been invited to understand.
A museum does something a runway, a store or a magazine can’t: it brings fashion down. It creates an environment for continuous observation—attention—and for placing “looks” in relation to other programs: design, history and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics). In that slow space, small details can catch on. The museum finds fashion while losing its living body. On the runway, clothes move—they are fueled by the gesture, presence, and energy of the model. In the gallery, that body disappears. Yet what takes its place is not absence but possibility: the opportunity to create new situations, new relationships and new ways of seeing.
In “Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses” (Brooklyn Museum, opening May 16, 2026), this change becomes more apparent. At the center of the exhibition is the Alchemical Atelier, a museum-scale evocation of a designer’s studio in Amsterdam. Walls lined with material samples, microscopes revealing hidden structures, drawings and video processing remove construction techniques that draw visitors to the testing area. At its core is Craftolution, a newly commissioned installation that magnifies the smallest touches of couture—the juxtaposition of materials, the intricacy of decoration—into a concentrated, almost architectural object. What is often invisible becomes a form of monumental work.
Although van Herpen’s work is often associated with advanced technology—3D printing, laser cutting, synthetic fabrication—what emerges here is not a break from tradition but rather its continuation. His work is well-rounded in couture, biology, digital design and engineering. It asks us to see the body differently: not as fixed, but as dynamic, porous and changing.
Van Herpen’s fascination with natural forms—the trees and waterways of his childhood in Wamel, insects, cellular structures—feel remote or abstract; it feels alive. When brought into conversation with scientific models and examples, her work goes beyond fashion to a broader question: how we understand life itself—through memory, intuition and learned knowledge alike.
We all have these moments, when an image or sound flips a switch in the mind. Museums quietly regulate such encounters. Creating an exhibition like “Painting the Senses” is not just about putting things together. It is about creating relationships and presenting emotions, plotting through manual and mechanical work, visual structures and cosmic forms, and natural phenomena and manufactured objects.
At the Brooklyn Museum, this approach has an example. The 2012 installation “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn” brought works from across the museum’s collection into conversation, encouraging visitors to draw transhistorical and transcultural connections. More recently, “Solid Gold,” marking the 200th anniversary of the museum, expanded this concept, bringing fashion into conversation with the collection to illuminate new constellations between time, objects and meaning. The plot “Sculpting the Senses” reflects this way of thinking. Passing through 11 themed stages, the exhibition unfolds like a journey, tracing the path from hidden architecture to the skin of a speculative future.
What matters is not only what is shown, but how it happens—how one encounter leads to another, how meaning accumulates. Information alone is rarely memory. Emotion does. In “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams” (2021-22), what most visitors remember is not a single look, but a feeling: a progression in space, a brilliance of color, a room with a view of infinity, the ultimate ballroom of clothes hanging in light and sound. This show is designed to be interesting and last long after the visitors have left.
Not all experiences now described as “immersive” are created equal. The term has been stretched to include everything from museum exhibits to commercial speculation that transforms objects into images. Museums work differently. Their mandate—and their responsibility—is to work with the real things that take place and have history. In an era created by screens, the museum offers something unusual: time, place and dimension. What appears on the screen is flat. Fashion does not exist. Clothes are a symbol. They must be encountered from all sides, understood through movement, proximity and presence.
Fashion shows are often underrated. However, as much as they can, they do more than show off what is already worn. They expand our perception by connecting the physical scale with large systems of information, from the microscopic to the cosmic. In doing so, they remind us that what we wear does not just appear. It is a way of thinking about ourselves in the world.
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