FASHION RARELY TRAFFICS in subtlety or subtext. It prizes risk-takers and a product that sells. Dries Van Noten’s career has implausibly embodied all of the above while tacking between classic and contemporary, avoiding the pitfalls of trend making that so often dog his peers. Van Noten, who started his career in menswear, recently announced that he would step back from his namesake house after his Spring/Summer 2025 menswear collection debuted in Paris on June 22, 2024. For a designer to call it quits at the height of his success is not unheard of, yet Van Noten’s popularity makes his decision all the more remarkable.
His 150th collection is a concise summary of his style, masterful in its restraint, daring in its emotional range, pairing suiting fabrics, earth tones, and bursts of embroidery to create garments as languorous as they are louche. Collaging clashing elements, Van Noten combines patterns inspired by paisleys, tie-dye, flocking, and marbled end papers, juxtaposing them with colors that make unusual bedfellows: olive drab with dusty pink, chartreuse with gold, pastel lime with copper. The tailoring layers formfitting T-shirts under belted oversize suit coats, sheer trenches, anoraks made from technical fabrics, and a python-skin pattern that appeared on everything from tops to boots. Van Noten has often remarked that the greatest compliment is seeing how someone incorporates his clothes into an outfit. His lookbooks evoke this kind of casual encounter between straitlaced and fluid styles, ready-to-wear and vintage garments.
In the unmarked warehouse in La Courneuve, on the outskirts of Paris, where the designer’s final runway show took place, an open courtyard was filled with cigarette smoke, small talk, and a who’s who of fans, buyers, editors, and Dries Van Noten staff, from stylists to salespeople. All were there to pay homage to one of the most significant designers of our times. A cube of projection screens displayed video clips from throughout his career, nipping, tucking, and hemming. This fractured portrait charted Van Noten’s evolution from the raffish 1980s of pointed lapels and sharp shoulders to his mature style of the early 2000s, when he became best known for a mélange of color, texture, and pattern, armed with his painterly approach to textile making and the vast archive of fabrics on hand in his atelier.
After about an hour and a half of champagne and Chablis, passed hors d’oeuvres of chilled pea soup and beef tartare, a curtain opened to reveal an adjacent, cavernous warehouse that had at its center a runway spotlit from above, with a spectacular quantity of silver leaf piled atop it, reminiscent of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres installation of foil-wrapped candy. Flanking the runway were two rows of silver Chiavari chairs, with a standing-room crowd of revelers, myself among them, eight hundred strong by all accounts. A melodramatic spoken-word monologue by David Bowie from Brett Morgen’s 2022 documentary Moonage Daydream opened the show:
Time
One of the most complex expressions
Memory made manifest
It’s something that straddles past and future
Without ever quite being present
Emerging from darkness, the first model appeared on the runway, striding through a snowdrift of silver leaf: a strikingly gray-bearded, middle-aged man who had walked in Van Noten’s first runway show, in 1991. At an emotional high point of the sixteen-minute extravaganza, when Philip Glass was playing overhead, I was reminded of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader’s final work. In Search of the Miraculous, 1975, the artist’s ill-fated attempt to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, remains the ultimate long goodbye, captured in the last known photograph of Ader setting sail into the unknown. There is an irrepressible sense of optimism about the image that mixes in the mind with an unnerving sense of doom in the not-too-distant horizon. If Van Noten’s final runway show offered only pure nostalgia it would be a failure; if it served up pure invention it might leave more questions than answers about why he was retiring at this moment. In 1976, the year that Ader’s boat was discovered and he was presumed lost at sea, Bowie recorded “Sound and Vision,” the final track Van Noten chose for his final runway show:
Blue, blue
I will sit right down (waiting for the gift of sound and vision)
And I will sing (waiting for the gift of sound and vision)
Drifting into my solitude
des Usines Babcock, Paris, June 22, 2024. Photo: Richard Bord/Getty Images.
When reviewing decades of Van Noten’s work, one notices a pleasurable sort of inconsistency in his wide-ranging influences. His collections are eclectic to a fault. For example, one particularly divisive season (women’s Autumn/Winter 2009–10) was directly influenced by Francis Bacon’s color palette: desaturated orange, Pepto-Bismol pink, bruised purple. In Reiner Holzemer’s 2017 documentary Dries, the designer admitted that this collection was a commercial disaster—perhaps because it was too narrowly focused on Bacon, as opposed to the layered and multi-referential style audiences had come to expect from Van Noten’s work. His successor remains unannounced, although he has publicly said that he will stay on to guide certain aspects of the brand under new ownership. Speculation was running rampant the night of the show. Whoever they may be, will they be allowed to sail into the unknown in pursuit of new fashion as the namesake of this house once did?
Born into a family of tailors going back three generations in Antwerp, Van Noten broke with his father’s fashion retail business to become a designer. The label’s flagship store in Antwerp, Het Modepaleis, a handsome haberdashery built in 1881, speaks to this heritage. Earlier in the week, while visiting the city, I thought of Adolf Loos’s shop for Knize (1910–13), considered to be the oldest menswear brand in the world, which still occupies its original site in Vienna. Both designers catered to the haute-bourgeois man of their times. Both spaces have survived in their original forms as menswear stores for over a century, despite changing fashions. Loos’s infamous impatience with “the dubious pleasure of embellishment” applies not just to the store he designed for Knize, but to the clothes he prized: “Individual clothing is only for people with limited intellectual capacity. They have the need to scream out to the world what they are and who they ultimately are.” Ironically, in contrast to the flamboyance of the clothes he produces, Van Noten’s own personal style adheres to Loos’s dictum: Even at his final runway show, the designer appeared in his typical unprepossessing outfit of a navy sweater and khakis.
collection, Paris, March 8, 2009. Photo: Patrick Kovarik/AFP via
Getty Images.
As the night’s procession of fine-feathered peacocks came to an end, Van Noten walked only a third of the way down the runway, just ahead of the scrum of friends and colleagues—among them fashion editors Hamish Bowles and Suzy Menkes, and designers Haider Ackermann, Thom Browne, Axel Vervoordt, and Diane von Furstenberg—then bowed, clasped his hands over his head, and walked away. Moments later, a curtain dropped to reveal a massive mirror ball, which kept heads spinning and phones flashing. Van Noten disappeared into the afterparty, as if he was determined to fashion an unemotional exit from a storied brand that he built so that it could live on without him.
Steve Pulimood has written on art and architecture for Art in America, Domus, Interview, 032c, and the New York Times, among other publications.
