Dries Van Noten talks to Cathy Horyn of the NewYorkTimes
extracts from the three page Style Magazine article
photo by
Paolo Roversi
link to the NYT Style article
extracts from the three page Style Magazine article
photo by
Paolo Roversi Van Noten, who is 46, says he underwent a radical shift in his own thinking about four years ago. After leading one of the biggest revolts in fashion history, as a member of the so-called Antwerp Six, Van Noten felt he was being frog-marched by magazine editors and stylists, who used their power to promote a claque of names and looks. ''There was a period when it was quite difficult to survive as a designer,'' Van Noten tells me. ''The worry was, 'I must be fashionable.''' The truth is that for all the talk about globalism, the fashion world has shrunk to the size of a walnut, and the walnut is named LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (or Gucci Group; take your pick). The big luxury companies may create buzz for the rest of the industry, but ultimately they're looking for a consensus.
Rather than play along, Van Noten decided to pass. ''Now my biggest concern is what I make -- do I like it, and are people going to want to have it,'' he says. ''I don't really worry if it's good for the young girl or the older woman. I just try to make something really beautiful.'' He adds: ''Are all the hip stylists going to like it, yes or no? I don't care anymore.''
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Van Noten, who worked at his father's haberdashery as a teenager -- his dad now runs the Association of Open Gardens of Flanders -- isn't nostalgic for the years when he and Martin Margiela and the rest of the Antwerp Six were so hard up that they had to travel to a Florence fashion fair in a pair of campers. But he sometimes misses the creativity that such limitations afford. He recalls a teacher he had at the Royal Academy, a Madame Prigot. ''She thought knees were the ugliest part of the body, that women with long hair were sluts and that Coco Chanel was a genius,'' he says. ''We had to be very creative to work within her restrictions.'' Which may be why Van Noten isn't itching to do a perfume or something equally grown up. This month he will open a store in Hong Kong with the retailers Joyce and Adrienne Ma -- his elegant flagship remains in Antwerp -- and in November he will release a limited-edition book to mark his 50th collection. But beyond that, he has no plans. ''The business is large enough so that we can live very well from it, and still a size that we can control and have fun with,'' he says.
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link to the NYT Style article
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