Dear Shaded Viewers,
You can say that I’ve loved the work of Patrick Van Ommeslaeghe for decades. I went to all of his fashion shows in Paris and I made this little fly on the wall video with him in 2001. Yesterday I was reading an article in Lewis’s Magazine about the most unacknowledged talent in the industry.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CqsbtteguLB/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
A rhythmic and gestural line, the cleansing purity of geometry, an enveloping expanse of fabric that caresses the body, unadulterated color that vibrates like a Barnett Newman painting—these are the fascinations of Patrick van Ommeslaeghe.
Ommeslaeghe was born in 1963 in Oudenaarde, Belgium. He pursued medicine before switching to fashion design and enrolling at the Royal Academy of Art in Antwerp. Ommeslaeghe was an outsider at a school full of rebels, pursuing classical idealism rather than the postmodern deconstruction of his peers.
His first gig was as an assistant to Josephus Thimister at Balenciaga where he helped reconcile the house’s couture heritage with ’90s minimalism. After Thimister was fired, Ommeslaeghe was hired by Jean Paul Gaultier at the behest of Linda Loppa. From there he went to work for Adeline André and it is she who would have the most significant impact on him as a designer.
In 1999 Ommeslaeghe launched his eponymous label and won the ANDAM prize. Although his stockists included the likes of Bergdorf Goodman, the economic fallout of 911 would later force him to close.
After a stint doing color at Pucci, he was invited to help Raf Simons get a handle on womenswear at Jil Sander. Ommeslaeghe began as a senior designer and was promoted to artistic director of the women’s studio in 2008.
Ommeslaeghe’s impact cannot be overstated. When Jil Sander supplied Tilda Swinton with her wardrobe in “I am Love,” it was Ommeslaeghe who designed it. The couture trilogy that has become a defining arc of Simons’s career is in fact Ommeslaeghe’s grand opus. Cross-analysis between Thimister’s Balenciaga, Ommeslaeghe’s eponymous label, and Simons’s subsequent and frankly less compelling work for Dior, Calvin Klein, and Prada reveals that this is indeed the truth. This is not said to malign Raf Simons (or Pieter Mulier) but to simply give credit where it is rightfully due.
Patrick van Ommeslaeghe is one of the most important designers of our time and most don’t seem to have a clue.
