The gowns hover.

Over 140 haute couture pieces fill the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum, suspended on mannequins tilted at angles that suggest orbit more than display. Some face the ceiling. Some lean forward as if caught mid-stride through a current only they can feel. The galleries shift between darkness and directed light, a living chiaroscuro that changes the garments from room to room. Salvador Breed’s soundscape moves beneath everything, low and continuous, almost tactile. And Iris van Herpen walks through the rooms she built, pointing at a dress made from 125 million bioluminescent algae, explaining that it glows when you touch it.

This is Sculpting the Senses. It opened its North American run on May 16, 2026, after three years of traveling from Paris to Brisbane to Singapore to Rotterdam. It will stay in Brooklyn through December 6. Timed tickets. Fifth floor. The Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing and the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery.

The building knows how to hold this kind of weight. The Brooklyn Museum traces its origins to 1823, when the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library was founded in Brooklyn Heights. By 1825, its building stood at the corner of Cranberry and Henry Streets, the cornerstone laid by the Marquis de Lafayette on the Fourth of July. By 1890, the institution had reorganized as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, an umbrella covering art, natural history, botany, and biological research. McKim, Mead & White designed the Beaux-Arts building on Eastern Parkway. The original plan would have made it the largest art museum in the world. That ambition was never completed. What survived is a collection of over 500,000 objects and a history of fashion exhibitions that stretches from Christian Dior in 2021 back through decades of institutional commitment to material culture.

Matthew Yokobosky, Senior Curator of Fashion and Material Culture, organized the Brooklyn presentation with Imani Williford, Curatorial Assistant. The Paris edition was curated by Cloé Pitiot and Louise Curtis at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, where it debuted on November 29, 2023.1 The Simons Foundation supports the Brooklyn run through its “Infinite Sums” initiative.

Iris van Herpen was born in 1984 in Wamel, a village in the Netherlands. She trained in classical ballet from childhood. She studied fashion design at ArtEZ Institute of the Arts in Arnhem, graduating in 2006. She interned with Alexander McQueen in London and with Claudy Jongstra, a textile artist, in Amsterdam. In 2007, at 23, she founded her own maison.

The debut collection was called Fragile Futurity. It showed at Amsterdam Fashion Week in July 2007. The following season, in January 2008, she presented Chemical Crows. She had reassembled the gold-coloured ribs of 700 children’s umbrellas into garments that looked like they had grown rather than been sewn. The Groninger Museum bought pieces from the show.

In 2010, she presented her first 3D-printed dress, from the Crystallization collection. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs now holds it. In 2011, she joined the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris, the governing body of French haute couture. She has shown biannually at Paris Haute Couture Week since. In 2014, she won the ANDAM Grand Prix, with mentorship from François-Henri Pinault. In 2017, the Johannes Vermeer Award, the Dutch state prize for the arts.

Nineteen years. One atelier. Amsterdam.

The exhibition moves through 11 thematic rooms. Water and Dreams opens the sequence. Sensory Sea Life follows. Then Skeletal Embodiment, Cabinet of Curiosities, sections on motion, on sound, on light. The galleries progress from the microscopic toward the cosmic. Marine biology gives way to anatomy. Anatomy to physics. Physics to astronomy.

Each room pairs Van Herpen’s garments with works by collaborating artists and scientific specimens. Philip Beesley’s responsive architectural lattices. Rogan Brown’s hand-cut paper sculptures of cellular structures. Casey Curran’s kinetic installations. Kim Keever’s tank-based photographic landscapes. Nick Knight’s fashion films. Fossils and coral on loan from the American Museum of Natural History. Dinosaur bones beside dresses made from laser-cut mesh and screenprinted duchesse satin.

The Cabinet of Curiosities room includes an evocation of Van Herpen’s Amsterdam atelier: hundreds of material samples, prototypes, tools, failed experiments. Shoes and masks and hair sculptures. The room makes the labor visible. A 3D-printed bodice next to the hand-drawn sketch that preceded it. A laser-cut Plexiglas panel next to the organza it was bonded to by hand. Visitors can touch the materials. The difference between this room and the rest of the exhibition is the difference between seeing a finished sentence and watching the pen move.

The atelier room is the centerpiece. The Cosmic Bloom gallery is darker, more theatrical, mannequins suspended at every angle wearing gowns in saturated reds and blues and purples, the effect planetary. But the atelier is where the exhibition earns its title. Sculpting the Senses is a claim about process, and process lives in that room.

Van Herpen told the preview audience that she works on materials before she designs garments. Collaboration with biologists, scientists, environmental organizations comes first. The material experiments produce the surfaces. The surfaces dictate the movements. The construction follows. This is the inversion that defines her atelier. Van Herpen begins with a microscope.

Her Autumn/Winter 2025 collection, Sympoiesis, featured a gown incorporating 125 million bioluminescent algae sealed inside a controlled biosphere on the dress itself. The organisms respond to touch. The garment glows. That piece is in this exhibition. Standing in front of it requires a recalibration of what couture means. The French system defines haute couture through criteria set by the Fédération: hand-sewn, made to order, fitted in multiple sessions, produced in an atelier of at least 15 full-time staff. Van Herpen meets every requirement. She also builds dresses that contain living ecosystems. The two facts coexist on the same mannequin, in the same room, on the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum.

She was asked at the preview what she loves about making things by hand. The question came from the audience. She paused. The answer, when it arrived, circled back to the same conviction: the hand and the machine share a discipline. The combination of fine handwork and technology is how the maison operates. Both serve the material

The exhibition is organized around nine broad themes, but the argument emerges through accumulation rather than declaration. Every room asks the same question in a different register: what is the relationship between the body and the material that covers it? Van Herpen’s answer, repeated across 19 years of collections, is that the relationship is biological. The garment grows from the same principles that govern coral formation, skeletal structure, the behavior of water under pressure.

She visits CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, to speak with particle physicists about surfaces. She has collaborated with scientists at MIT. She uses lucid dreaming as a design tool, translating patterns she encounters in sleep into garment geometries. She describes the process with studio discipline, as if the dream were a sketchbook with its own rules.

The Brooklyn Museum’s own history makes this legible. The institution began as a hybrid of arts and sciences. It held natural history specimens alongside paintings. The departments of photography, astronomy, bacteriology, and psychology all operated under the same roof in the 1890s. Van Herpen’s practice, which treats a particle accelerator and a couture atelier as two rooms in the same building, fits the institutional architecture more precisely than any fashion exhibition the museum has mounted.

Beyoncé has worn Van Herpen on the Renaissance World Tour. Lady Gaga wore the maison’s work as early as 2011. Björk, Cate Blanchett, Ariana Grande, Grimes. The celebrity record is real. The exhibition buries it. The garments are shown without attribution to any wearer. They are presented as objects, as resolved arguments about what a body can carry.

The preview empties. The soundscape continues. Salvador Breed’s composition fills the galleries even without visitors, a low hum that makes the rooms feel occupied by something other than mannequins.

Sculpting the Senses runs through December 6, 2026. Seven months. The longest any venue has held the exhibition since it left Paris. The Brooklyn Museum’s fifth floor will carry 140 garments, two decades of material research, collaborations with physicists, architects, marine biologists, and a Dutch couturière who learned her trade from McQueen and spent the years since proving that the atelier and the laboratory answer to the same discipline.

The gowns hover. They have always hovered. The room adjusts.

All images by Higher Class Editions

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The lake freezes. The horses come.

Every February, sixty centimeters of ice form over Lake St. Moritz in the Upper Engadin valley of Graubünden, Switzerland. The lake sits at 1,768 meters above sea level. When the surface hardens, a racecourse is measured, packed, and marked across the frozen water. Thoroughbreds arrive from across Europe. Jockeys are briefed on conditions that exist nowhere else in competitive racing. Studded shoes replace standard horseshoes. There is no turf. No dirt. Only compacted snow over ice, and the sound it makes when a thousand-pound animal hits it at speed.

This is White Turf. It has been running since 1907. It has never left the lake.

The origin is specific enough to feel invented.

In 1906, British winter tourists in St. Moritz tied ropes to horses and skied ten kilometers down the road from St. Moritz to Champfer. Philip Mark, president of the Alpina Ski Club, won the race on a horse named Blitz. German for lightning. No spectators. No rules. No course. Just a man, a horse, a frozen road, and the question of whether speed on ice was sport or recklessness.

The following February, the answer moved onto the lake. The first official White Turf staged trotting races and skijoring on the frozen surface. Flat races followed in 1911.1 What began as a dare calcified into a date. What became a date became a calendar. What became a calendar has not missed a February in over a century.

Three Sundays. First race at 11:30. Last by 15:00. Distances from 1,300 meters to 2,700 meters. Prize money totaling roughly half a million Swiss francs. Over 30,000 spectators across the three weekends. A tent city of 130,000 square meters rises on the ice. Grandstands, kitchens, bars, art exhibitions, a children’s area. All of it temporary. All of it gone by March.

The infrastructure is built on a surface that will not exist in eight weeks. That fact governs everything.

The centerpiece is the skijoring, and nothing else in sport looks like it.

The word comes from the Norwegian “snorekjoring.” Driving with ropes. In the Swiss version, which exists only here, the horses carry no rider. The skier holds the reins. He steers. He balances. He negotiates 2,700 meters of frozen lake at fifty kilometers per hour behind a riderless thoroughbred that knows exactly what it is doing and does not care whether the human behind it can keep up.

The sport was proposed as a medal event for the 1928 Winter Olympics, hosted in St. Moritz. It was rejected. It appeared once, as a demonstration, on February 12, 1928.2 The Olympic committee may have understood what the locals already knew: this sport cannot be exported. It belongs to the lake.

In 1965, not a single skijoring team finished. The conditions defeated every entry. The race was recorded, not canceled. The following year, they ran it again. The year after that, again.

The winner across the three Sundays is crowned King of the Engadin Valley. A title with no prize money, no trophy of consequence, and no commercial value. A title that exists because the lake froze.

What separates White Turf from every other event on the sporting calendar is a single word: dependency.

Wimbledon has a retractable roof. Formula 1 resurfaces its circuits. The Kentucky Derby maintains its turf with surgical precision. White Turf controls nothing. It depends on winter arriving, the lake freezing to sufficient depth, and the temperature holding across three consecutive weekends. If the winter is mild, there is no ice. If there is no ice, there is no event. No backup venue. No indoor alternative. No rescheduling.

In January 2026, the ice on Lake St. Moritz was so thin it could barely support a log. By February, winter delivered. The races proceeded.

This dependency is what separates ritual from entertainment. Entertainment is manufactured. Ritual is conditional. The condition here is winter itself. The organizers do not produce White Turf. They wait for it.

St. Moritz understood this before anyone.

In 1864, hotelier Johannes Badrutt made a wager with a group of British summer guests: return in winter, and if you do not enjoy yourselves, he would cover every expense. They returned. They stayed. The winter season was born. From that wager came the Cresta Run in 1884. Bobsleigh. Skeleton. Polo on the frozen lake every January. And White Turf every February.

Each sport was an act of choreography applied to cold. St. Moritz did not endure winter. It gave winter a program. But of all the sports that emerged from the ice, White Turf remains the most dependent on it. Polo has been exported. Bobsleigh travels the world. The Cresta Run operates on a constructed track. White Turf operates on a lake that must freeze on its own terms, to its own depth, on its own schedule.

No one builds the venue. The climate does.

There is something worth protecting in a spectacle that cannot be manufactured.

In an era that designs experiences for audiences who will never attend in person, White Turf remains stubbornly physical. You cannot stream a frozen lake into existence. You cannot fabricate sixty centimeters of ice. You cannot digitize the sound of hooves hitting packed snow at speed, the spray of white behind a skijoring team through the final turn, the way the Engadin light sits on the mountains at 14:00 in February when the flat race field separates and the crowd leans forward.

The event requires presence. Not as a luxury. As a condition. The horses must be there. The cold must be there. The ice must hold.

When the third Sunday ends, the infrastructure comes down. Tents dismantled. Grandstands removed. Course markings erased. Within weeks, the ice begins to thin. By spring, the lake is water again. There is no monument on the shore. No plaque marking where Blitz ran in 1906, or where no one finished in 1965, or where for one hundred and nineteen winters the same frozen surface held the same improbable sport.

The lake returns to what it was before the race. The race returns to where it always goes. Somewhere between memory and forecast. Somewhere between the last thaw and the next freeze.

One hundred and nineteen winters. The same lake. The same wager against the season.

White Turf does not outlast winter. It is the proof that winter arrived.

All images courtesy of White Turf

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