Dries Van Noten on his 25 years in fashion ... and 100 catwalk shows
Dries Van Noten measures out his working life in fashion shows rather than years and in March 2017, the 59-year-old Belgian designer — recently made a baron by King Philippe — marked his 100th catwalk show in his own inimitable way. He bought his friends some plane tickets to Paris.
Admittedly, they were his bestlooking friends: 54 of the most famous models who have walked in many of the designer’s shows since 1993; Amber Valletta, Cecilia Chancellor, Emma Balfour, Alek Wek and Carolyn Murphy among them. Many hadn’t seen each other for years, and their reunion was an emotional one.
“Big (luxury) groups are doing fashion shows with crazy budgets but I didn’t feel like doing a big show in that way,” Van Noten tells me some months later in his warehouse loft office, high above the old port in Antwerp. “So we chose to do something different. Why don’t we fly in everyone that has walked my shows in the past and bring them together with girls who are going to be my favourites of the future?” he smiles.
Van Noten is one of the most successful independent fashion designers in the world. Coming to prominence in the 1980s, he has built a brand that dances to the beat of its own drum. His six standalone stores may be a pinprick on the luxury retail market, but his collections are sold in more than 500 outlets around the world and his integrity inspires devotion and loyalty in retailers and customers.
“I try to make clothes that I hope are so desirable people know not to wear them only once,” says the designer in his quiet, unhurried manner. “The garments have a personality. You can wear them in lots of ways. Really, they are like letters in the alphabet. You can use them to form your own words.”
Or, rather, poems. Dries (sounds like “trees”, if you’re wondering) is the dream for anyone wearing his clothes. Those lush, rich fabrics, the faraway colours, the clashing prints, the Indian embroidery, all make for something opulent and imaginative.
Fans go weak at the knees at the very name of the label — although they may know little about the person behind it. At a dinner recently, a woman who had been wearing Dries Van Noten clothes for decades was surprised when I told her the designer was a man.
Van Noten’s family owned a highend fashion boutique outside Antwerp. He grew up visiting showrooms in Paris, Milan and Düsseldorf and is comfortable with the idea of fashion as product. “I like the commercial aspect of fashion,” he says. “It’s not an art form. To find the right shape of pant or a nice heel — not only 11 cm heels but a heel under 4 cm that many women would be very happy to wear — it is a challenge I must consider.”
You slide open a painted wooden door to get into Van Noten’s office, which is on the fourth floor of the company’s huge renovated warehouse. They moved here in 2000.
His parquet-floored space, next to the studio, is furnished with a few pieces of grand Victorian furniture. A rug marks the spot where Harry, his Airedale terrier, sometimes sits, but he isn’t always up to the commute that Van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe, his partner in life and in business, do daily from Ringenhof, their 19th-century home in the countryside.
His 100th collection includes a back catalogue of iconic Van Noten prints — a Japanese kimono design from autumn/winter 2013, English roses from spring/summer 1994 — all refocused on to new designs. Something old(er) made into something new.
“I liked the idea because I want to make clothes that are timeless,” he says, his elbows resting on the office’s long table where he can spread out papers and fabrics. “Also, I like that people would still have a dress from 1998 and could buy something matching. You can see then that your wardrobe is an evolution rather than separate things.”
The shows are also being celebrated with two books, a full retrospective of every Dries Van Noten fashion show that includes more than 2,000 photographs, written by the fashion journalists Tim Blanks and Susannah Frankel.
Van Noten’s clothes dazzle in catwalk photography and the detail of embroidery or an accessory, or the depth of a colour is captivating. As is the staging, which can range from utterly simple to wildly extravagant. For the spring 2015 show, Van Noten recreated the feeling of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia with hazy lighting and a mossy forest floor as a catwalk, made from a bespoke carpet by Alexandra Kehayoglou. For spring/summer 2017, Van Noten commissioned the Japanese floral artist Azuma Makoto to make exquisite botanical arrangements
The books
frozen in towers of ice.
The opening soundtrack was the eerie echo of the blocks cracking under the hot lights before melting into little streams that ran along the catwalk.
Van Noten does everything with painstaking consideration. In the documentary Art of Style: Dries Van Noten, released earlier this year and directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, the designer and Vangheluwe are shown preparing an evening meal with a care that will put your weekday pasta and sauce to shame.
Also revealed: the detailed itineraries of his holidays, with their schedules devised to fit in as many museum and garden visits as possible. (Both men are dedicated gardeners and their 55 acres of park and grounds are magical — despite Van Noten’s aside that should they ever write a horticultural book it would be called The Depressed Gardener.)
He honours his relationships with his suppliers, season after season. Embroidered prints are part of his aesthetic signature but they remain there partly because small firms rely on the work. “I don’t think that it’s correct to say that one season we print everything, then say bye-bye to the manufacturer,” he says. “We build a relationship.”
Embroidery is designed in Antwerp and he employs three people, “flying the whole time back and forth to Kolkata”, where they have had work done since 1988. From there, handwork is sent out to around 2,000 workers in remote villages.
Traditionally it is men who are embroiderers and the skill is passed down from father to son. Van Noten is now employing his second generation of male embroiderers. “I think it’s really good how, in the same way that you learn from your mother to knit or to cook, those boys are learning from their father how to embroider. That’s a nice thing.”
Van Noten’s grandfather was a tailor; his father, too, before he opened his shop. “They opened a store in 1969 to ’70 and the ’70s were an extremely exciting time for fashion because it was the end of haute couture. It was prêt-à-porter, then it was punk.”
He started fashion school young: in 1976, he was only 18, and new designers were bursting out all over the place — Vivienne Westwood and then Katharine Hamnett in London, Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace in Milan and Jean Paul Gaultier in Paris.
He and his classmates in Antwerp — Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee — were inspired to start their own scene. They hired a truck and headed to London where they set up shop at London Fashion Week and coined their collective name, the Antwerp Six.
“The dreams were different in that time,” says Van Noten. “Now fashion has become a big business and young kids want to do it to become a celebrity or to earn money. At that time it was a way of expression — especially for gay guys — to do things that they loved. It was about doing crazy things for fashion shows, original things. It made no money. That was not the point.”
Which is perhaps why he says he’s still amazed every time he goes downstairs to the stock room and sees the quantity of clothes that are going out, as they are right now beneath us, in boxes all bound for Italy. “I know, of course, that I’ve been very successful,” he says.
“But I know, also, that every season I have to prove myself again. You would say now after all these years in fashion and all these collections, there must be a formula, but no. I still have to surprise my customers, I have to surprise my team and I have to surprise myself.”
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