“The body is central in the exhibition and what fascinates me about our body the most is not the outside, but that the atomic anatomy of our bodies is all empty space,” van Herpen tells Vogue. “99.9% of it is empty space. When you think about that, it is so surreal.” It was from these ideas that the designer and artists began to create Gu’s “Airo” dress: “In this design, I wanted to reflect the realism and the surrealism at the same time.”
Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images
The gown features 15,000 hand-formed, individually bonded, iridescent glass bubbles. Hidden beneath its light and airy silhouette is a complex system of microprocessors, bubble nozzles, air pumps, and a portable power system that releases pressurized gas and bubbles timed by an algorithmically engineered code. What that meant on the 2026 Met Gala red carpet? Two to five actual bubbles were released per second as Gu walked the carpet, making for a dreamy, whimsical walking tableau.
“It speaks deeply to me through themes of motion and stillness: being in the air, when time slows down,” says Gu, “and the nature of reality: breaking boundaries of what is traditionally ‘possible,’ whether it be creating a dress that ontologically inverts a bubble as both an ephemeral and intangible entity, or redefining what modern womanhood can look like in the realm of a traditionally male-dominated extreme sport.”
Considering the theme, van Herpen wanted to offer up an alternative view on the human form: “I didn’t want to express our body from the way we normally perceive it—its beauty, its outside. I wanted the dress to inspire to look at the body from a different perspective, a scientific one also.”
Photo: Ryan McDaniels for Iris van Herpen
