There is no easing into the Iris van Herpen exhibition at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) in Meanjin/Brisbane.

You’ll gasp as you turn the corner to enter the first darkened room of Sculpting the Senses — the immersive experience that is a celebration of the Dutch haute couturier’s works of art.

In that first room of nine, dedicated to Water and Dreams, you will find a dress that resembles a splash of water frozen in time.

A thin white femme model wears a dress that looks like a freeze frame of water splashing over them.

Van Herpen crafted her infamous 2013 Water dress using thermoplastic polyester. (Supplied: Sølve Sundsbø)

When she created it in 2013, van Herpen tasked a model with standing on a plinth while buckets of water were thrown at them from various angles, with several cameras filming the whole process in slow motion.

After selecting the most dramatic stills from the footage, van Herpen translated those suspended splashes into material form by painstakingly manipulating heat-moulded waves of thermoplastic polyester with tweezers.

The Water dress exemplifies van Herpen as a designer: It was created as an ode to the beauty and diversity of the natural world, and as part of a desire to communicate how fundamental nature is to life on Earth. It also uniquely transgresses traditional clothing norms, using a blend of traditional couture craftsmanship and pioneering technology.

Iris sits on a chair and looks to the camera as an unseen fan blows her blonde hair. She wears a shiny black coat.

By the age of 23, van Herpen (pictured) had set up her own atelier. Four years later, she was invited to join the haute couture association in Paris. (Supplied: Robin de Puy)

This is why 40-year-old van Herpen became the youngest woman designer to receive the honour of a solo exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (MAD) in Paris, France, which debuted Sculpting the Senses in 2023.

It’s also why the exhibition, originally curated by Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis, went on to become one of the Paris museum’s most popular of all time, garnering more than 370,000 visitors in just five months.

And it’s why GOMA risked putting on a huge exhibition centred on a designer relatively unknown in Australia

Van Herpen’s brilliance has cut through internationally. She’s designed a custom gown for Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour, show-stopping looks for the likes of Grimes and Winnie Harlow at various Met Galas, and has made couture designs for Lady Gaga, Tilda Swinton and Indya Moore.

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Her works are also in the collections of the National Gallery Victoria (NGV), the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

“Still, not many people had heard of her [when MAD offered GOMA the show],” GOMA’s curator of international art Nina Miall says — and she was among them.

But the team at GOMA quickly realised that while van Herpen’s name may have lacked recognition among Australians, her work, and her story, could more than speak for itself.

“We also knew if we didn’t do the show, the NGV probably would,” Miall says with a laugh.

Trained in classical ballet from a young age, van Herpen still has the discipline and attention to detail of a dancer, Miall says.

“She is, I think she would say, quite uncompromising. She’s a true artist: when she has a vision, she works incredibly hard to realise it.”

This is how van Herpen was able to set up her own atelier by the age of 23, and how, by the age of 27, she had been invited to join the haute couture association in Paris.

“She’s got incredible singular dedication and focus … from the earliest years of her career she’s had this commitment to experimentation, to working with unconventional materials, redefining fashion and rethinking prescribed notions of femininity,” Miall continues.

Van Herpen’s Chemical Crows collection is a prime example of this. In 2008 the designer was given 700 children’s umbrellas leftover from a wedding. Van Herpen ended up using their tines, of all things, to fashion otherworldly garments.

To Miall, there is no question about whether van Herpen’s work is art, or whether it deserves a display of this magnitude.

A while model puts their hands on their gown made from gold metal umbrella tines that delicately bend.

The Alchemic dress from the Chemical Crows collection in 2008, made using leftover umbrella tines and ecoleather. (Supplied: Duy Vo)

Here’s what you can expect from the exhibition

Sculpting the Senses focuses on the nine threads of inquiry that drive van Herpen to create. They share similarly vague names to the first, Water and Dreams, but can be broadly summarised as explorations of her love of nature, movement, our history and our rapidly changing future.

More than 130 of van Herpen’s garments sit in conversation with artworks from across the globe.

A Black model poses in a photoshoot in a gown that somewhat resembles a skeleton when extended.

Van Herpen’s Labyrinthine gown from the 2020 Sensory Seas collection was inspired by fibrous marine ecology and comes alive when in motion. (Supplied: Luigi and Lango)

An array of cultural artefacts and natural history specimens invite you to marvel at van Herpen’s fascination with history and the natural world. This designer not only has the ability to find beauty in everything from skeletal forms to spores, but is also able to reflect the intricate shapes only nature could devise.

A soundscape, composed by the artist Salvador Breed (who just so happens to be van Herpen’s partner), accompanies the exhibition.

In order to capture the motion that is an integral part of van Herpen’s design, some of the gowns have been paired with moving headdresses, while other garments are animated by fans hidden within the plinths they stand on.

“That was a lot of prototyping because she didn’t want the mechanism of the fan to be seen, she just wanted this gentle undulation, almost like kelp in the sea,” Miall says.

A model walks the runway in a meticulously layered blue mini dress that flows with every step.

Sculpting the Senses offers visitors plenty of opportunities to see van Herpen’s designs as they were intended to be experienced. (Supplied: Gio Staiano)

In a nod to van Herpen’s classical dance roots, Mununjali and Guugu Yimithirr dancer Elijah-Jade Bowen from the Queensland Ballet performs on the gallery floor at several points throughout the exhibition run. And to help visitors truly grasp the complexity of her creations, there’s video content throughout the show depicting van Herpen’s garments in motion on the runway, in the sky and underwater.

You are even allowed to touch things as you step into van Herpen’s “alchemical atelier” to see how key elements of her designs are created and have been refined through the years.

The evolution of an artist

While each of van Herpen’s garments on display at GOMA can technically be worn, donning them (particularly some of the earlier ones) might not be comfortable.

A white model places an arm around their head as they pose in a shoot in a skeleton dress.

The 2011 Skeleton dress is one of van Herpen’s earlier 3D-printed garments. (Supplied: Luigi and Lango)

“We always play this game, ‘Would you be able to go to the bathroom in that one?'” Miall admits.

“And I think [celebrities will often] wear them on the red carpet, you know, into the venue, and then they have to get dressed for the award show so they can sit down and eat.”

The technology van Herpen uses to 3D-print her garments is constantly advancing and the materials she uses could be anything from the aforementioned umbrella tines, to silk, blown glass or organza. Her latest 3D-printed designs use far smaller elements and are so fluid they can even be washed and pressed.

When van Herpen started using the technology in 2009, 3D-printing flexible garments wasn’t possible. The 2011 Skeleton dress likely wouldn’t pass the bathroom test. Nor would van Herpen’s equally iconic neo-gothic 2012 Cathedral dress, which Miall describes as “two pieces of plastic that click together — no one is wearing that dress, but it’s so bold and daring”.

A Black model poses in a dress that almost resembles a peacock's mesmerising display when extended.

By 2018, van Herpen was creating technological garments including the Syntopia dress that were simultaneously sculptural and innately kinetic. (Supplied: Sølve Sundsbø)

After Meanjin, the exhibition will travel to Asia and Europe. It will never look like this again, though.

About 80 per cent of the van Herpen designs displayed at MAD made it to the GOMA exhibit, but a few were too fragile, and others weren’t allowed into the country because of biosecurity laws.

So, van Herpen was invited to source rare books, artefacts and artworks to complement her works from the Queensland Museum and GOMA archives.

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But the Voice to Parliament prompted the show’s biggest point of difference

When Miall met up with van Herpen in her atelier outside of Amsterdam to prepare for the GOMA exhibition, it was only a few weeks after the rejection of the proposed constitutional change to recognise Indigenous peoples in Australia through a Voice to Parliament.

Miall says much of the dialogue surrounding the debate was new to van Herpen, a Dutch national.

“But she’s so open and curious about the world… and it struck me there were a lot of Western reference points in the show, so, I said: ‘How would you feel about bringing in some First Nations artists?'” Miall says.

An Asian model wears a structural white gown and looks to the camera with a fierce expression, with a black background.

The 2020 Morphogenesis dress was inspired by the similarities van Herpen noticed between the human central nervous system and that of marine life. (Supplied: David Ụzọchukwu)

Together, they ended up selecting three works by Indigenous artists to include in the exhibition.

Quandamooka artist Megan Cope‘s piece is, deliberately, the first thing visitors encounter upon arriving at Sculpting the Senses.

Her 2023 oyster tapestry Whispers Wall references the ancestral middens built from First Nations peoples’ accumulated shell waste over thousands of years.

Halfway through the exhibition, on the other side of the tapestry, you see Cope’s piece in dialogue with van Herpen’s 2011 Diploria coat. Together, they speak to the challenges facing our oceans.

The second work by an Indigenous artist is a 2015 piece by Gunybi Ganambarr called Nganmarra, which saw the Yolngu artist etch traditional designs onto a piece of metal found on Country. Ganambarr’s commitment to an innovative use of materials, mixed with the traditional, mirrors van Herpen’s tendency to do the same.

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The final work by a First Nations artist in the exhibition is Lama-Lama woman Doris Platt’s 2008 depiction of discarded Goanna skin. Platt’s piece echoes van Herpen’s attentiveness to the rhythms of nature.

Collectively, the three pieces remind us that the issues van Herpen seeks to explore in her designs have been articulated and depicted here for tens of thousands of years through art — if not through haute couture.

Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses is at the Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until October 7.





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