To enchant a crowd worn soft by a day of heat, compulsively fanning itself, borders on sorcery. And yet Julian Klausner and his team did it. Three menswear collections into the creative direction he took on from Dries Van Noten himself in 2024, after six years learning at his side, he carries the patterned torch high.
The room was a great white square, and it filled with colour as the silhouettes came, powder and blush and butter at first, warming through peach and caramel, brightening at last into the yellows, greens and blues of high summer. Sequins caught the light like sun skimming water.
It was softness, perfectly cut. The clothes seemed barely fastened to the body. Tailoring lost its starch and began to flutter. Necklines dropped low on the chest. The masculine staples were present then loosened, a trench gone transparent, a parka cut in washed pongé silk, a hunting jacket kept for little more than its grosgrain belt. Legs were bare under shorts cut high.
Then the lingerie crept in, charmeuse silks, straps thin as drawstrings. Lace and broderie anglaise gathered at the neck, collars cut off at the raw edge. Foulards asked to be tied and untied. On the last silhouettes the tailoring turned black and fluid, dressed for whatever the night might allow.
Behind it all sat a poem, the kind every French schoolchild meets and most forget, “L’Après-midi d’un faune”. How lovely, then, that Klausner should scatter it back into our minds. Mallarmé wrote it in 1876, and it remains a touchstone of Symbolism, the dreamlike monologue of a faun just woken from his afternoon nap, unsure whether the nymphs he watched that morning were real or dreamed. He reaches for them and they slip away. So he chooses to sleep on, for the dream gives them back to him more fully than waking ever could. Fantasy over reality, and who could blame him. The nymphs Klausner sent across that white square will dance on in our sleep just the same.
The boys walked with wet hair and shadowed eyes, freshly woken from a nap en plein air. Charms hung from little chains, beer capsules and keys and screws tangled with twigs, the hoard of a bird lining its nest. The show closed on Daydream, by the Belgian group Wallace Collection. Sweet dreams are made of this, of silk, of lightness, of men who turn like nymphs.
