Op-Ed: Fashion Exhibitions as Labs for Interdisciplinary Thinking
Spend enough time in a fashion exhibition, and you begin to hear a particular kind of conversation. “I would wear that,” someone says. Or, just as often, “How do you even sit in something like that?” These remarks are not incidental. They reveal fashion’s singular ability to draw audiences into dialogue—about the body, about taste and about the objects themselves. Everyone wears clothes; everyone has an opinion. That shared familiarity helps in part to explain the enduring appeal of fashion exhibitions. But it also points to something more compelling. At their best, these exhibitions are not simply about glamour, celebrity or beauty. They are spaces where ideas are tested—about materials, about the body, about technology and about what “nature” even means today.
What visitors bring with them matters. They arrive shaped by knowledge and experience, but also with something more intuitive—a kind of primordial understanding of the world. For example, across cultures and centuries, people have looked at gold and associated it with the sun. In a world before scientific reason, gold was believed to form where sunlight and
A museum does something that a runway, store or magazine cannot: it slows fashion down. It creates the condition for sustained looking—for attention—and for placing “looks” in relation to other systems: design, history and STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics). In that slowed space, small insights can take hold. The museum inherits fashion at the moment it loses its living body. On the runway, clothes move—they are animated by gesture, by presence, by the energy of the model. In the gallery, that body disappears. Yet what replaces it is not absence but possibility: the chance to construct 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 especially vivid. 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 revealing hidden structures, sketches and process videos that demystify fabrication techniques draw visitors into a space of experimentation. At its core is Craftolution, a newly commissioned installation that magnifies the smallest gestures of couture—the joining of materials, the intricacy of embellishment—into something immersive, almost architectural. What is usually invisible becomes a kind of monumental performance.
While van Herpen’s work is often associated with advanced technologies—3D printing, laser cutting, synthetic fabrication—what emerges here is not a break from tradition but rather its continuation. Her work moves fluidly across couture, biology, digital design and engineering. It asks us to see the body differently: not as fixed, but as dynamic, porous and evolving.
Van Herpen’s fascination with natural forms—the trees and waterways of her childhood in Wamel, insects, cellular structures—does not feel distant or abstract; it feels lived. When placed in dialogue with scientific models and specimens, her work expands beyond fashion into a broader inquiry: how we come to understand life itself—through memory, intuition and learned knowledge alike.
We all have these moments, when an image or a sound flips a switch in the mind. Museums quietly curate such encounters. To create an exhibition like “Sculpting the Senses” is not simply to assemble objects. It is to construct relationships and to introduce moods, to choreograph a passage through handwork and machine, microscopic structures and cosmic forms, and natural phenomena and manufactured materials.
At the Brooklyn Museum, this approach has precedent. The 2012 installation “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn” brought works from across the museum’s collection into dialogue, encouraging visitors to draw transhistorical and transcultural connections. More recently, “Solid Gold,” marking the museum’s 200th anniversary, extended this logic, bringing fashion into dialogue with the collection to illuminate new constellations across time, material and meaning. The structure of “Sculpting the Senses” reflects this way of thinking. Moving across 11 thematic sections, the exhibition progresses as a journey, tracing a path from hidden biological architectures to speculative future skins.
What matters is not only what is shown, but how it unfolds—how one encounter leads to another, how meaning accumulates. Information alone rarely becomes memory. Emotion does. In “Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams” (2021-22), what many visitors recall is not a single look, but a sensation: the progression through space, the crescendo of color, the mirrored infinity room, the final ballroom of gowns suspended in light and sound. The exhibition built toward an experience that lingers long after visitors leave.
Not all experiences now described as “immersive” are created equally. The term has been stretched to encompass everything from museum exhibitions to commercial projections that replace objects with images. Museums operate differently. Their authority—and their responsibility—lies in working with the real objects that occupy space and carry history. In an era shaped by screens, the museum offers something increasingly rare: time, space and dimensionality. What appears on a screen is flat. Fashion is not. Garments are sculptural. They must be encountered in the round, understood through movement, proximity and presence.
Fashion exhibitions are often underestimated. Yet at their best, they do more than display what has been worn. They expand how we see by linking 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 just surface. It is a way of thinking about ourselves in the world.
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