Dries van Noten will step down as Creative Director of his own label after the menswear show in Paris in June 2024. He says he’ll remain engaged, but he wants time, and surely, he’s earned time off from the relentless hunger of fashions’seasons.
In 1985 I went to the British Designer Show at Olympia, there was an exhibition stand of six new, young designers who I recall were in England for the first time called the Antwerp Six. I remember that the static display was of a distinct colour palette, with a chalky powdery hue, and that although I was there to look at womenswear it was Dries Nan Noten’s menswear I singled out. Hardly the gift of prophesy since his work was already mature, focussed and with a personal style that lifted it above others. Of course, Walter van Bierendonck and Dirk Bikkembergs along with Ann Demeulemeester were strong in their own ways, as were Marina Yee, Dirk van Saene. Dries had been working quietly away since graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1980.
I remember the visuals, the photography, and the mood of Dries van Noten in print and through a kind of underground swell around his name. Hard to remember all the details but he was already on “the fashion radar.” The next few years I also remember wondering why he wasn’t on the Paris schedule. However, finally in 1991 he was on the menswear schedule.
What’s hard to understand so often with fashion, if you’ve not been there, is how revolutionary people are at the beginning when later it’s their accepted manner of operation, their style and many others have copied, diluted, and bastardised their originality. Dries shows were innovative in atmosphere, in the mixing in of womenswear in the early menswear shows, in the unexpected and in a special understated sexiness because everyone looked so good in the clothes, and so relaxed and happy. Now I’m looking back through images, I recall the frites and beer in January 1993, the Bollywood soundtrack later that same year, and of course leaving my hotel incredibly early to lie on a white cottonIndian mattress at 09.00.
By 1994 the flowers, the bejewelling, the mixture, the textures, and the sheer perfection of Dries looks was settling in to become his “look”. His confidence grew each season with both menswear and womenswear to excite more and more people. If you were covering the collections, his shows became a “must see.” I remember in July 1995 the buzz of excitement as we waited in the shade of the trees on a bench in the gardens of the Palais Royal in truly sweltering heat and instead of the first model walking between us, they appeared on bicycles wheeling around laughing and waving. I remember the group finale in 1996 when for the first time, the parade finished with model after model in a huge rainbow hued group striding down the tunnel location. The finale would end in a huge line across the vast ruined train factory outside Paris in the same year, as well as the copper leaf, I thought it was gold, for the 1997 show which I called “The Golden Road to Samarkand”, a show so fabulous I remember not being able to edit down to the required number of images. Later that year Dries presented a sombre and introspective show in a scenery store of the Paris Opera, so cold we could see our breath as we arrived, stunned by a new severity yet with all the Dries van Noten signatures muted down. Unlike the drummers, not muted at all, thirty of them providing the music.
For those whose Dries van Noten experience is through the 2000’s and obviously much later, what I’m trying to communicate is, he was magnificent and focussed, and true to his creative instincts always. He was to put it in a cliché “simply” Dries van Noten. I remember going after a collection to see the buying; the space thronged with people all ages, sizes, colouring, and all wearing Dries. His clothes worked because with his integrity as a designer he created clothes people wanted to own and wear, and it was possible for everybody. His shapes, colours, surfaces, and construction remained diverse and broad ranging, whilst always staying true to his aesthetic.
The elements of print, pattern, embellishment, tailoring and softly constructed, wonderful coats, brilliant scarves, hints of retro and cultural references mixed into Dries van Noten, once established, ebbed, and flowed with the seasons. Sportier or more formal, darker, or richer, more classic elements, more ethnically inspired pieces, yet with Dries van Noten it’s a mix of signature producing the collection rather than either a rigid structure or a single attitude, otherwise how on earth can over a hundred collections in over thirty years be so brilliant?
The collection where the table became the runway, the models resting on a country moss pathway, the collaboration with Christian Lacroix, the return to the same location for a show but created in a totally different mood. The sheer inventiveness of the designer is certainly special, but it’s always the undefinable that stumps the writer. The elements of Dries van Noten can be summarised, but they do not define his success, or explain his longevity. His approach is one hundred percent commitment and he’s branded a workaholic, but that doesn’t explain his success, the years of the success. It doesn’t explain the outpouring of regret since the announcement of his leaving Dies van Noten, the house, name, label, and brand he created.
Perhaps it’s because, I think, his creativity is based around beautiful things, be it an Indian paisley or a rose, a sharp tailored pin stripe jacket or a lavishly embroidered coat, It must be the fashion equivalent of a phrase used by the great British soprano Isabel Baillie, “Never Sing Louder Than Lovely” and I offer the opinion that in his creativity Dries van Noten only offers us the beautiful.
Tony Glenville
