In 2011 it looked like a dress sent back from the future. Fifteen years on, Iris van Herpen’s “Skeleton” dress is showing its age far sooner than anyone expected, and Vanity Fair Italia has revisited the curious problem it set for conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
A dress that came out of a printer
The Dutch designer showed the piece in Capriole, her autumn/winter 2011–12 collection and her haute couture debut in Paris. The collection was inspired by the sensation of a free-fall parachute jump, and the Skeleton dress was meant to capture the moment when the whole body seems to expand in every direction. Its white, rigid frame wraps the torso like a bony shell, as if the inside of the body had been turned outwards. “This dress visualizes the inside of the body outside,” van Herpen later told Vogue.
No needle and thread were involved. Made with the architect Isaïe Bloch and the Belgian 3D-printing company Materialise, the dress was produced by selective laser sintering: a laser fuses fine nylon powder, one thin layer at a time, following a digital model. The result is a slightly grainy, porous white surface that suits the look of bone remarkably well.
Why the future is turning yellow
The Met’s Costume Institute acquired the dress in 2015, its first 3D-printed garment. In an essay for the museum, the conservator Sarah Scaturro explained that by the time it arrived it had already yellowed, dirt had settled into its porous surface and several of the most delicate tips had broken off, a sign that the material was becoming brittle. She described these problems as irreversible and untreatable.
The cause lies in the making. According to the Met, the printing process keeps the nylon at high temperatures for long periods, and leftover powder is sometimes reused and reheated in later builds, so the polymer is already partly degraded when it becomes an object. The technique was also designed for prototypes that are not expected to last. For a museum, which hopes to keep a garment for centuries, that is a real challenge, and there is still little research on how best to preserve 3D-printed objects. Nobody can say how long the dress will survive, even in carefully controlled conditions.
Scaturro recalled van Herpen once declaring that “the shortness of fashion is here”, a line that now reads almost literally. It is a good reminder of why natural materials still matter: a well-made gemstone piece can be worn for decades. Browse our luminous moonstone rings and opal rings, sculptural bangles or our pendant necklaces.
Sources: Vanity Fair Italia (17 October 2026); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “(Im)mortal Fashion: Iris van Herpen’s ‘Skeleton’ Dress” by Sarah Scaturro; The Met, “The secret lives of artworks”; Iris van Herpen, Capriole collection notes; Vogue; High Museum of Art.
