DRIES VAN NOTEN
An unparalled eye for detail and an intuitive understanding of the Zeitgeist have served the Belgian designer well.
An intuitive understanding of the Zeitgeist has served the Belgian designer well
When it comes to rocking the fashion world, Antwerp has a surprisingly active track record. Straddling the banks of the river Scheldt in Dutch-speaking Flanders, the small Belgian city leapt onto the international fashion stage in 1986 when six young designers, graduates of the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, hired a van and drove to London to present their collections at the British Designer Show. Together, their distinct styles captured the rebellious spirit of the decade and enamoured press and buyers alike who, unable to pronounce their long names, labelled the group the Antwerp Six.
Recent activity surrounding one of the group’s members, Dries van Noten, has once again sent delightful Flemish shockwaves across the world of fashion. Harking back, at least in an abstract way, to the collective spirit of the Antwerp Six, Van Noten delighted fashionistas across the globe with his spring/summer 2020 ready-to-wear show, which revealed a one-off ostrich-plumed collection, co-created with none other than Christian Lacroix. “We started to look to 1980s and ’90s couture, a little New Romantic and Adam Ant,” Van Noten recalls, revealing that he and his team wanted to escape the sense of doom and gloom currently gripping the planet. “Quite quickly, we had a lot of Christian Lacroix on the board. So
I said, ‘Why don’t I call him?’” The harmony in the resulting alliance — Lacroix’s grand couture gestures and Van Noten’s marked sense of modernity — was astounding. And as Vogue reported the following day: “How smart of Van Noten to intuit that this is a time when apparently extremely different points of view can be brought together to create something beautiful… If only today’s politicians could be so creative.”
While the theatricality of the Lacroix collaboration may not be typical of Van Noten — having carved for himself a niche in crafting thoughtful and sophisticated elegance over the course of his three-decade career — there is nevertheless a subtle sense of unbridled joy within the rigour of each of his designs. This alchemy of exuberance and restraint, and practicality and art, has as much to do with his Flemish heritage as it does his talent as a designer. Antwerp, though discreet and compact, has been an outward-looking port city since the 12th century and was an important centre of the Renaissance — a Florence of the North, so to speak. It was the birthplace of Van Dyck, the place Rubens lived most of his life and its Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Van Noten’s alma mater) was founded in 1663 and is one of the oldest of its kind on the continent.
Both the designer’s father and grandfather were tailors, perhaps explaining why menswear was his first foray into design. When Barneys New York placed its seminal order, not long after the Antwerp Six exploded onto the world stage, the department store company simply bought Van Noten’s first collection for men in the smallest sizes and sold it as women’s. ››
‹‹ More than 100 collections later and Van Noten is widely considered the benchmark against which all independent designers might be measured. In an age of conglomerates and endless pre-collections, he remained steadfastly committed to just two highly considered collections of ready-to-wear each year, consciously avoiding more lucrative sidelines in perfume and accessories.
So when it was announced that Van Noten had sold a majority stake in his fashion house to Spanish conglomerate Puig in June 2018, Dries devotees went into a tailspin. “Puig is a family company and that’s important,” Van Noten told Vogue a few weeks after the announcement. “I will control completely all the creative side and I can focus more on the creative side, and now they can help me with the business growth.” And with double-digit growth in the years leading up to the sale, its unlikely Puig will interfere with the business model. The irony of Van Noten selling his fashion house to a company that specialises in making fragrances — after so steadfastly avoiding brand extensions — however, cannot be lost.
Sitting like a neoclassical pearl against the verdant Flemish landscape outside of Antwerp is the designer’s ‘other’ house, Ringenhof, the 1840s country mansion he shares with his partner in life and work, Patrick Vangheluwe. Wandering its procession of rooms is akin to exploring a life-size jewel-box, created in collaboration with local designer Gert Voorjans, who is to interiors what Van Noten is to fashion. Comfortable armchairs and vases laden with branches from the garden ground each space. And it’s the garden that Van Noten escapes to when respite from the frenetic pace of the fashion world is required. With borders of golden grasses and gem-like dahlias, silhouettes both clipped and rambling, the garden reads like a 22-hectare metaphor for the rich and storied ready-to-wear for which Van Noten is celebrated. “Everything that Patrick and I are doing in life is done with a lot of passion,” Van Noten explains in the 2017 documentary Dries. “This house, the garden, the way we live, it’s very intense. We often laugh with it and sometimes we also suffer from it — that we are maniacs in detail and also that we make things rather complicated.” Complicated or not, the devil — even the divine — is in the detail. driesvannoten.com