Iris van Herpen Invites Visitors to Help Pleat a Collective Garment at the Brooklyn Museum

Since the 2010s, Iris van Herpen has become one of the most distinctive figures in contemporary fashion, fusing ancient pleating techniques with 3D printing and organic materials to create pieces often described as wearable sculptures. Her designs, shown at Paris haute couture week, have also entered museum collections around the world, blurring the line between garment and art object.

At the Brooklyn Museum, van Herpen is now offering a participatory experiment: rather than unveiling a finished piece, she is inviting visitors to help pleat a collective garment, its making unfolding gradually through the accumulated gestures of the public. The approach shifts the creative act usually confined to the atelier into the museum space itself, turning fabrication into a visible, ongoing performance.

The project fits within a broader museum trend toward immersive, collaborative formats in which the process of making matters as much as the finished object. For van Herpen, whose practice has long probed the relationship between body, material and motion, direct public involvement extends her longstanding exploration of clothing as a living organism rather than mere adornment.

The initiative arrives amid a busy stretch for American cultural institutions, with tensions over Smithsonian governance under the Trump administration and Rice University's announcement of tuition-free enrollment for a large share of its students — two stories closely watched across the US museum and academic world.

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Written by the ADM desk based on Hyperallergic. Read the original article for the full story.