When Mark Zuckerberg attended the debut of Prada’s Fall/Winter ’26 collection in February, the ensuing outcry was only partly about his being a fascistic plutocrat. Here was a man who had once famously repudiated fashion; for whom normcore was a fetish and personal brand; whose livery of heather gray and slim-fit denim was an affront to the very idea of getting dressed. Here he was, sitting front row at the Thinking Woman’s runway show, one-time Communist Miuccia Prada’s runway show. When, several months later, Bezos 2.0 underwrote the Met Gala, the pretense became too much to bear. If every dead-eyed capitalist with right-wing curiosities were banned from the province of luxury fashion, the industry would collapse quicker than the time it takes for a model to tumble from the perch of a stiletto. Still, the aesthetic sensibilities of our Founder elites—best embodied in the brutish figure of the Cybertruck and the ersatz one of Lauren Sanchez Bezos—should (one would think) cause even the most hardened couturier to clutch her pearls. Indeed, the closer Big Fashion draws to Big Tech, the more it seems like the two should have nothing to do with one another.
The Dutch designer Iris van Herpen makes a valiant case for the contrary. Sculpting the Senses, an exhibition on view at the Brooklyn Museum showcasing 140 of her avant-garde creations, casts Van Herpen as an undeterred techno-optimist just hitting her stride. In 2010, four years after she got her first laptop, she produced the first-ever 3D printed dress for the runway, a skeletal carapace made of bone-white synthetic polymer. In 2014, she did a residency at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, from which came a collection that analogized the wiring of the Large Hadron Collider to hand-woven fabrication; 2017 saw laser-cut Mylar gowns in staccato, interruptive textures punctuated with negative space in an ode to the digital glitch. In one room of the exhibition, a dress called “Radiation Invasion” translates the electromagnetic waves that carry digital information in swirling appliqués of leather and polyurethane. In another, a silk organza confection is hand-pleated into undulating curves sketched by 3D modeling software. The designer understands her embrace of new technologies for textile development to be in perfect synergy with the traditions of the atelier. As she told Dazed back in 2021, “I think the dichotomy in my work is that it travels into the future and back into the past. It’s an evolution of craftsmanship.”
While elsewhere, the screeching exaltation of tech’s latest offering portends nothing less than a threat to artists everywhere, in Amsterdam, Van Herpen quietly finds a strange equilibrium. On the one hand, her clothes seem to reassert the human body in a digital world. On the other hand, they’re so completely impractical, so ill-suited for most contexts, that you might be moved to philosophize about where couture ends and sculpture begins. Hundreds of hours of R&D and thousands of dollars’ worth of digital equipment accumulate in each piece: not a unit of high-performance apparel but a purely ornamental garment, unready to wear and gloriously unoptimized.