When Olympic skier Eileen Gu walked the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Met Gala on May 4, she wore a short, shimmering gown that appeared to be made of thousands of iridescent soap bubbles caught mid-float, clustered across her body and trailing into the air behind her.

It was created by Iris van Herpen in collaboration with the Tokyo-London design studio A.A.Murakami. Assembled from 15,000 hand-formed glass bubbles, it took 2,550 hours to construct, and contained hidden microprocessors that released real bubbles into the air as Gu moved.

It was also a glimpse into the show that opens at the Brooklyn Museum on May 16: Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses, the North American debut of a retrospective that has already traveled from Paris to Brisbane, Australia, then Singapore and the Netherlands.

The 2016 original of that bubble dress will be in the show. “It represents the air that’s inside of our bodies,” says Matthew Yokobosky, the Brooklyn Museum’s senior curator of fashion and material culture. “Over 90% of our bodies are made up of air.”

Over two decades, van Herpen has built a body of work that treats science as a creative collaborator. She has made couture inspired by the air in our lungs, the architecture of a stingray’s skeleton, the magnetic fields of the Large Hadron Collider. She has worked with architects, paleontologists, and biologists, and used everything from iron filings to magnets to bioluminescent algae as raw materials. In doing so, she has quietly redefined what it means for fashion to be art.

The Brooklyn Museum has been making that argument for nearly a century. Its 1934 Story of Silk exhibition is often cited as the beginning of fashion’s museum era; it has since staged retrospectives of work by Madame Grès, Schiaparelli, Jean Paul Gaultier, Pierre Cardin, Christian Dior, Virgil Abloh, and Thierry Mugler. Sculpting the Senses extends the lineage.

Water in all its forms

The bubble dress is a launchpad for the exhibit. “The show starts about different inspirations from the different forms of water, liquid, frozen, gaseous, and how all those different states have been equally informative for her as a design inspiration,” Yokobosky explains.

It is paired with a piece by the Japanese art collective Mé, a work that Yokobosky says “looks as if they had taken a slice of the ocean and put it into the gallery.”

Van Herpen, who grew up in the Dutch village of Wamel, has returned again and again to water in all its states. That preoccupation goes back to the work that put her on the map. Her 2010 Crystallization collection, built around limestone deposits, ice crystals, and the choreography of a splash, contained the first 3D-printed garment ever shown on a fashion runway.

The skeletal, ivory-colored top made in collaboration with British architect Daniel Widrig, is on display in Brooklyn. Depending on the angle, the piece looks like a fossilized vertebra or a Dutch ruff from the 17th century. Materialise, the Belgian 3D-printing firm that helped fabricate it, had until then been making architectural models.

Bones, fossils, and a baby dinosaur

Since the natural history specimens in the Paris version of van Herpen’s show couldn’t travel, Yokobosky struck up a new partnership with the American Museum of Natural History. The Brooklyn show now includes an 80-million-year-old ichthyosaur skeleton and a baby dinosaur, displayed in dialogue with van Herpen’s bone-inspired couture. A gown built around the architecture of bird skeletons sits near the dinosaur fossils—a nod to the fact that birds are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.

“When you look at Iris’s gown, you don’t necessarily see bones immediately, but as you look more closely, you realize that there are all those articulations of bone,” Yokobosky says.

Biomimicry runs deep in van Herpen’s work. Her atelier doesn’t replicate a fish scale; it studies how a fish scale is structured, then translates that structure into a new material. Lucid (2016) borrowed from the orb webs of argiope spiders. Sympoiesis and Sensory Seas took their cues from coral systems.

The designer’s work has a sustainability dimension too. Van Herpen has experimented with garments made from recycled plastic ocean waste, 3D-printed cocoa beans, and, last year, created a “living” dress in collaboration with biodesigner Chris Bellamy that was seeded with 125 million bioluminescent algae.

In an industry that produces somewhere between 92 million and 100 million tons of textile waste every year, the gesture suggests that garments don’t have to come from petrochemicals. They can come from a lab, or a forest, or—occasionally—a tide pool.

The slowest fashion

The most quietly radical section of the show may be the one with no garment at all. For the Brooklyn exhibit, van Herpen created a new video installation that takes the small, often invisible gestures of her atelier—the placement of a hand, the catch of a needle, the slow accumulation of a single embroidered surface—and projects them, unedited and in real time, onto 25-foot-high screens inside the museum’s 70-foot rotunda.

“She really wanted people to understand the slow process that goes into making couture . . . what emerges from this long, meditative process,” Yokobosky says.

Fashion in 2026 is dominated by AI-generated lookbooks, Shein-style ultrafast cycles, and the increasingly seamless integration of agentic commerce into the shopping experience. In contrast, van Herpen does not even do ready-to-wear; she focuses entirely on couture. She still makes everything by hand, in collaboration with a rotating cast of scientists and artists, and she still sells the pieces. She just doesn’t make very many of them.

“She is very devoted to the craft of couture and to experimenting and helping us understand what is possible in the future of fashion,” Yokobosky says.

The Brooklyn show closes in a space the museum is calling Cosmic Bloom: a darkened room full of mannequins suspended from the ceiling at strange angles, wearing some of van Herpen’s most surreal and saturated gowns. It is also a clear statement of what the entire exhibition is arguing—that the body, in van Herpen’s hands, isn’t a hanger for product. It is a small piece of the universe, and clothing is one of the languages we use to describe it.

Sculpting the Senses runs through December 6.

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McDonald’s spent decades training customers that if you had a dollar, you could get a burger. Now it’s trying to redefine what “value” means, and it turns out customers have a very different idea. More important, those customers aren’t about to pay $2.50 for something they think should cost a lot less without complaining about it.

It’s less a story about burgers and more a story about trust. Specifically, it’s a story about the promise McDonald’s has made its customers for decades. It’s also about the trust problem the company created entirely on its own when its customers decided it was no longer keeping that promise.

The actual story here is that McDonald’s rolled out its new McValue menu, featuring items that are all “under $3 each.” It’s built around what the company calls “predictable everyday low prices.” There are no more complicated app-only promotions, no more buy-one-get-one deals, no more dollar menu nostalgia. Instead, you get prices that are, depending on how you do the math, roughly two and a half times what customers remember paying not that long ago.

The backlash has been immediate and, honestly, a little brutal. There are Reddit threads full of people reminiscing about 99¢ McDoubles. Customers are publicly mourning the death of the “buy one, get one for $1” deals that used to anchor their lunch routine. The general sense is that McDonald’s has lost touch with what its customers actually perceive as a value.

Here’s the thing: None of this is actually about the $2.50 cost of a McDouble.

McDonald’s built its entire competitive position on one very specific idea—that value and convenience are more important than anything else. If you were hungry, McDonald’s was fast, and the price was low enough that evaluating your options felt like a waste of time.

Which is why a $2.50 McDouble isn’t being evaluated against inflation-adjusted commodity prices or franchisee labor costs. It’s being evaluated against what McDonald’s itself promised for 30 years. The company ran dollar menus and two-for-one campaigns long enough to wire a specific expectation into an entire generation of customers. Unwiring that expectation requires a lot more than a press release about a “value platform.”

The timing makes it worse. Airline fees, streaming price hikes, hotel “resort fees” at places with no resort—Americans have spent the past few years watching every affordable convenience slowly get more expensive and less generous. Fast food was one of the last categories that still felt like a safe, cheap, low-stakes decision. That feeling is gone now, and McDonald’s is the most visible symbol of its disappearance.

There’s also a threshold problem the company may be underestimating. Once fast-food prices climb close enough to fast-casual prices, customers start asking the one question McDonald’s has never wanted them to ask: Is this actually good? For most of the restaurant’s history, that question never came up because the price made it irrelevant. When you’re spending closer to $10 once you add fries and a drink, you start comparing the experience against options that might be slightly more expensive but noticeably better.

McDonald’s never needed to win that comparison in the past. It just depended on customers not thinking about it at all.

To be clear: The economics here aren’t crazy. Wages are up. Ingredients cost more. Franchises are businesses, not charities. Selling burgers for a dollar wasn’t going to last forever.

But what companies can’t control is how customers emotionally process the moment the change arrives. McDonald’s didn’t just raise prices—it disrupted the unconscious habit that made it indispensable. And once people start treating a fast-food run as a calculated purchase instead of an automatic one, McDonald’s puts itself in a completely different business than the one it built its brand on. That’s something no company should ever do.

—Jason Aten

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This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

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