Dries Van Noten - Designer

[Scott]

yeah people perceive that advertising is so easy peasy but i've heard from so many that it costs more to generate than what it ultimately makes.....especially if you're an independent business like dries,admirably,has remained.

 

[vetements]

I like how he mentioned he teaches people how to wear clothes they already have in their wardrobe and not necessarily having to buy new ones: Dries' use of colors, textures, ethnic, patterns, proportion and size etc certainly inspires many.

 

[fashionista-ta]

A nice mention - the only problem with it is the assumption that everyone writing here is a) a girl and b) a teenager. I don't think that's right at all.

Yeah ... that was strange. If he's reading his show threads he must realize we're not all 14. That must've come out wrong

I liked what he said about giving people ideas about how to wear what's in their closets. I'm not sure that's happening for me, but I like the thought

I did, btw, try to find the pants from the spring runway that I wondered if I could get away with wearing to work. Thanks to all of the restrictions about where Dries can be shipped, obviously it is quite challenging to find online. That was OK when Barneys was still here, now it is not I did manage to find via lookbook & get sent in for me a similar pair in the brown colorway (I liked the navy with pink), but the backside was plaid. The fit was also funny ... overall good, but there was something odd happening in the front. But the floral in front, strong plaid in back is something that would not be well understood here In fact I knew exactly who the very first person at work to comment on them would be But the fit issue made all that moot.

PS Not sure if I've seen Garance on video before. Does she always come off like such a fangirl? Maybe that's why he was going on about 14 yo girls

 

[EnModeArtiste]

 

[Marc10]

Dries Van Noten, The Secret Genius of Design

Dries Van Noten presents his collections twice a year in Paris, but to meet him, you have to travel 200-odd miles northeast, to Antwerp, the seat of Flemish Belgium, where his headquarters is a five-story former wine and spirits warehouse on the waterfront. Graffiti uncovered during its renovation showed that it sheltered both German and Allied soldiers during various parts of World War II.

When the designer moved his company here in 2000, the area was not yet the home of Belgium’s new multimillion-euro MAS museum or its Michelin-starred restaurant; it was just a seedy strand not far from the bustling port that has made Antwerp a hub since the Renaissance.

But fortunes change, and landscapes change with them. The fortunes of the Dries Van Noten company have been on a slow but steady ascent throughout its existence—including during the global recession.

From the very beginning, he has owned his business and has never deviated from that model. As conglomerate groups like LVMH and Kering developed around him in the nineties, he remained independent. “Our business doesn’t have to grow every year a huge amount like when you are a part of a big group,” he said. “I don’t need to have a store in every city. It’s a luxury that I can say I just want to continue the way that we are doing…to be creative and be busy with things I really love and not be forced to do all the bags and the shoes and the sunglasses and things like that.”

He is also steadfast in his loyalty to his home city. “Antwerp has a lot of advantages,” he told me. “A few years ago, maybe it was more strange to be outside of the centers of fashion. Now, with the Internet and traveling that you can do, I think I’m more central than some people in Paris.”

There’s a telltale nape among men’s fashion editors, to judge from a glance around the Paris shows. The under-collars of their jackets (often navy, often double-breasted) flash a panel of pure white. That’s the sign and symbol of Van Noten, who has been applying it to his jackets since it first featured in his Fall 2009 collection. The effect is as if some unseen hand had held you by the scruff of the neck as you were dipped in blue dye.

“It became kind of a signature,” Van Noten told me. “Me, even myself, I wear the jacket with the white under-collar. Quite often when we walk around the city with some of our team and it’s cold, we put our collars up; you see from the back four guys with white under-collars. You think, oops, maybe this is quite obvious.”

It’s a characteristic of Van Noten to back away from even the suggestion of label-mongering. His is a brand without a ubiquitous logo. He makes clothes, and while he does design shoes and accessories, he says they account for only 10 percent of his sales. He doesn’t advertise, which keeps his pieces more frequently on the backs of editors than it does in the pages of their magazines.

He sniffs at what he calls product—logo T-shirts, branded ephemera—that is the bulwark of many
designer businesses. He doesn’t make fragrances, another cash cow, though he was recently the subject of one: His friend, the perfumer Frédéric Malle, did the first in his series of “portrait” scents of Van Noten.

“I admire his discretion,” Malle told me. “Dries doesn’t try to be a star. His work speaks for itself and has made him one.”

White-collared jackets aside, it’s hard to predict what a Van Noten collection will comprise. Unlike many other designers, Van Noten is not overwhelmingly associated with one style or type of clothing—no Burberry trench, or Gucci loafer. At his own stores, associates say, his suits sell briskly, but so do what they call his “special pieces”—which may be, from season to season, a hybrid jodhpur/track pant in a tricolor orange-navy-and-white stripe, from a collection inspired by hunting and fishing gear, or a fencer’s jacket in a splotchy, ectoplasmic camouflage Van Noten custom designs.

After the all-camouflage Spring show he staged last summer, Van Noten abruptly shifted gears for Fall and plunged into the feminine. In January, he showed a Fall collection inspired, he said, by a “walk of shame”: He imagined boys rolling out of their girlfriends’ beds, throwing on whatever on the floor is closest to hand—a mix of paisley pajamas, beaded sweaters, and muzzy robes.

The gentle blur between men’s and women’s pieces is echt Van Noten. In 1986, his very first client, Barneys New York, bought his men’s collection in small sizes and sold it as womenswear. He launched the label with menswear, but, he said, “only for the practical reason that I found only one manufacturer who wanted to help me to produce my clothes, which was by coincidence the menswear manufacturer.” He added a full women’s collection in 1993.

Van Noten continues to champion a louche brand of elegance that nudges against the accepted borders of menswear—a world still largely divided between all-American sportiness and Savile Row stiffness. A show he recalls as a favorite was inspired by David Bowie in his besuited Thin White Duke period. “Until [then], everything had to be ‘cool’ menswear to be accepted,” he said. “And what was cool quite often was related to sportswear. So I thought, is there a way I can make menswear elegant but still that guys would consider it cool? Cool to be elegant, which is different than wearing the right sneakers, or wearing the jeans that you need to have, or the polo shirt from Lacoste or Fred Perry with just exactly the right color of logo and right size of logo.”

The danger of such an approach is that it can quickly lead a designer into the weeds, staging the kind of “editorial” runway fantasies that flop once they reach the sales floor—or dividing his output between two collections, one for artistry and magazine spreads, one much simpler for commercial production.

But Van Noten insists that everything he shows on the runway is destined for life in a store—either one of the five that he owns, in Antwerp, Paris, and throughout the Far East, or one of his longtime wholesale partners. But he doesn’t pretend to be sure. “That’s the nice thing and the unpleasant thing in fashion,” he said. “You don’t know. For instance, the embroidered shirt from this winter in silk georgette. I thought, nobody’s going to buy this. For the show we have the silk georgette, but for commercial reasons, we’re going to do the same one in cotton voile to have a more masculine one. Silk georgette we sold very well, cotton voile we didn’t sell a piece. So if you think that you know why…” He smiled and opened his hands. “I don’t know why.”

Clothes may make the man, but cotton doesn’t make the manhood. “That’s changed quite a lot,” he said. “I think men are really busy now with what they put on, and I think that’s one of the reasons why men’s business is doing quite well.” He likened it to the heyday of men’s fashion in the late seventies and early eighties—the era of Versace and Armani, Ray Petri and Buffalo, Gaultier and Westwood—when he was studying at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. “For me it was really influential. In the seventies you had things like Versace and Armani who changed fashion completely. You had leather for men’s clothes, which was completely new. I bought for myself during school times a leather tuxedo jacket from Versace, which was incredible, really daring.”

His own collections have, at times, traveled to the nearer shores of over-the-top. (His Bowie collection was trimmed with acres of fur.) But even when they flirt with excess, the spirit resides in the finer details—like the white under-collars. “I think that’s what menswear is about, to find small things that just give a little sign that you are…in French they have a nice word for it,” Van Noten said. “Soigné.”

wwd.com

 

[Marc10]

...

The personal experience is paramount at Van Noten’s boutiques. He likes stores, the live experience of them, and labors over their design. His Paris men’s store, opened in 2010, was conceived as the ideal gentleman’s home. He rotates art and antiques he collects through it. (A recent acquisition is a small portrait by van Dyck.) “I think buying fashion must be a treat,” he says. “I think it must be fun to go to a store. You have to do nice windows. You have to be well-received. The whole experience has to be there.” In an era when brands are selling their goods online, Van Noten has largely resisted doing so. The impersonality of it seems to rankle him.

At the same time, Van Noten’s Paris fashion shows, which once tended toward the baroque, have come down in scale. Etienne Russo, the production maestro who now stages extravagant shows for the likes of Chanel, Hermès, and Moncler, got his start doing so for Van Noten. Longtime followers remember the earlier, wilder shows fondly. “I wouldn’t go to very many shows because I didn’t have the time,” said Nina Garduno, then the vice president of menswear at L.A.’s Ron Herman, who was one of Van Noten’s earliest U.S. clients. “But one of the shows I would go to would be Dries. For me, it was the fantasy of what it’s all about—what it’s all supposed to be.” One show put models on bicycles in a park; another, staged in Moroccan tents at the outskirts of the city, continued even as snow started to come down. “It was just absolutely romantic, memories you just never forget,” Garduno said.

Van Noten seems regretful of the change, which is largely due to the difficulties of working within the ever-more-crowded fashion calendar. “Sometimes it’s a pity,” he said. “I’m also nostalgic. It would be nice to do that. Everything’s changing, so we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but we will see. It would be nice to do an extravaganza again.”

When Van Noten began his label, the very idea of “Belgian fashion” was somewhat suspect. His father owned a chain of fashion stores, which stocked men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing, much of it imported from European labels like Ungaro, Ferragamo, and Zegna. “It was early seventies,” Van Noten remembered, “so you can imagine it was a lot of brown carpet and Plexiglas and smoked mirrors.”

As the youngest child of the family, with a brother and two sisters at university, Van Noten would do his homework at the shop and spent school holidays traveling with his parents to fashion shows and buying trips in Paris, Florence, and Milan. It was something of a foregone conclusion that he would go into the family business. But when he went to Antwerp’s Royal Academy and announced his intention to study design rather than preparing to take over the store, his father was so incensed that he withdrew his support. “It was a little bit like an experiment, becoming a Belgian fashion designer,” Van Noten recalled. “Still very absurd and quite surrealistic.” It took, he estimated, ten years for his father to get over the slight. “For fathers, it always takes a longer time,” he said gently.

In fact, it was Van Noten himself, along with a handful of classmates from the Royal Academy—Dirk
Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee, together with Van Noten, the so-called Antwerp Six; a young conceptualist named Martin Margiela who followed shortly thereafter—who helped normalize the idea of a Belgian designer. Now plenty of fashion talent is grown in Belgium—like Raf Simons, who was named creative director of Dior in 2012, or Christian Wijnants, who won the International Woolmark Prize for fashion in 2013—but the path was laid by Van Noten and his contemporaries.

“Dries was a kind of example,” said Linda Loppa, who worked at Van Noten’s company in its early days and headed the Royal Academy’s fashion department from 1982 until 2007, when she moved to Florence to become the dean of Polimoda. “Dries is always that kind of father figure now in Belgian fashion, how he constructed the company.”

The company, in addition to being independent, remains small and concentrated. Those around him tend to stay around him a long time. Stylist Nancy Rohde has been a part of the team for14 years; even the menswear salesman at his Antwerp boutique has worked there for 12. “I prefer that they become a part of the family,” Van Noten shrugged.

Business and family, in fact, commingle: His partner in business is his partner in life, Patrick Vangheluwe. The third member of their nuclear family is their adored Airedale terrier, Harry, who joins the couple in the studio every day, where he has free rein.

For Van Noten, whose blood runs deep in Antwerp, the past is always present—not just at the headquarters on Godefriduskaai, where the second floor is given over to an enormous archive. Van Noten credits his grandfather, a tailor, with introducing ready-made suiting to Antwerp; his shop, on Antwerp’s Kammenstraat, sat across the street from where Van Noten’s own store now stands. When Van Noten and Vangheluwe invited me to their favorite restaurant in Antwerp, they were greeted warmly by the waitress, the line cook, and the host. One quipped that they had been coming to the restaurant, in its various iterations, for 40 years. It was a joke, Van Noten explained. They’d actually been coming for 36.

Fashion may be a changing marketplace, but at Van Noten Andries NV, business is done as business has been done. How feasible this independence will remain, Van Noten admits, isn’t clear. “I don’t know, of course, for the future, how possible it’s going to be,” he said. “Because the world is changing fast, and sometimes you see also that it would be easier if we joined forces.” By the same token, despite his aversion to selling online, he admits the company is investigating ways to do just that.

But a kind of holy compromise is the heart of the Van Noten label. “I think men always try to find something that they recognize,” Van Noten said. “But you have to surprise them also at the same time. You have to create things that are not alien to them, that they have reference, that they know. But on the other hand, you have to surprise them; you have to say, like, ‘Shut up, put this on.’ But in fact, it’s OK, it looks good.

“It’s always that kind of thing,” he went on. He gave the example of Cole Mohr, the lavishly tattooed, chain-smoking punk of male modeling. “He’s coming in wearing a hardcore T-shirt and jeans,” he said. “What can we put on him that is still believable? What is the furthest we can go? This season, we put a silk georgette shirt with diamond embroidery and leather pants. For me, it was perfectly acceptable. And he thought also it was perfectly acceptable. So I said, ‘OK, that’s good. That’s what we need to do.’”

wwd.com

 

[HeatherAnne]

He sniffs at what he calls product—logo T-shirts, branded ephemera—that is the bulwark of many designer businesses.

YES!

Great story, it really showed what his personality is like. Loved the "shut up, put this on, it's OK, it looks good" And the story he related about his team all flipping up their white collars: "You think, oops, maybe this is quite obvious”. He seems really chill, totally love him.

 

[luluposh]

"Beautiful Minds" - FT.com / June 7, 2013
[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ddf68b1a-c315-11e2-9bcb-00144feab7de.html#axzz2W6GWw4uD]

Dries Van Noten is one of the world’s most successful independent designers. An original member of the Antwerp Six, the group of Belgians who transformed the city into a locus of avant-garde fashion in the mid-1980s, he is sold at more than 500 outlets worldwide, and has won the international award of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).

Elizabeth Peyton is an American artist known for her stylised figurative portraits of well-known people; her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou in Paris, and the Kunstmuseum in Basel. The two have been friends since 2009.

How we met

Dries Van Noten: When I have to make a collection, I am always looking for things that can inspire me, and communicate, but also that are open to different ways of interpretation, because the last thing I need is for my team to be repeating what I am saying. Years ago, I bought a book of your work, and it just spoke enormously to me, with the sense of colour and emotion. So when I had to come to New York to get the CFDA award, I asked if they could invite you to the dinner.

Elizabeth Peyton: And then I met you again, when you won another award, and then I came to your house in Antwerp for dinner, and it was wonderful. Of course, I’d been wearing your clothes for a long time by then. They interested me, because they always feel full of references. Also, they feel very honest.

DVN: That’s a compliment. When I start, I always want clothes to touch on reality but make you see it in a different way.

. . .

Finding inspiration

DVN: I actually did a whole collection based on a painting of yours once.

EP: Did I know that? I don’t remember that. Which one?

DVN: It was the men’s collection from spring/summer 2009 [shown in June 2008], and the painting was called “Democrats are More Beautiful” from 2001. The painting had a feeling of precision, and a clarity of colour I really liked. So I put it on the table and said to my team, “This is next season. Do something. What’s the story of that guy?” And some of them played with the colours, others with the lifestyle ... When I see your work, it feels very intimate but also layered at the same time. And I feel I haven’t gotten through many layers of Elizabeth.

EP: You have no idea!

DVN: Then you asked to draw [my partner] Patrick [Vangheluwe] and myself when you were at our house, which was a very strange experience for me. I’m used to getting photographed but this was something else. It was much more personal.

EP: The faces people make when they are photographed, and the face they have when you draw them are very different. It’s a very special thing to share with someone, because it’s time spent together that is not about eating or the usual social things.

DVN: I was touched when you asked but also a little scared. It’s odd to go from spectator to subject, and to be looked at so closely.

. . .

Contemporary art

EP: It’s interesting [that] you have art in your house but not really contemporary art.

DVN: The art we have is part of the decoration. I actually don’t want to own contemporary art. For me, when I really respect a work of art, I don’t want to shut it away in my house, and keep it just for myself.

EP: Really? I love the idea that someone I like would have a piece of mine in their house, and have a relationship with it. Not that I’m trying to convince you to own my work, you understand.

DVN: My relationship with your work is in my thoughts. I’m very digital: once I’ve seen something I like, I can remember it. Of course, it has to be a pretty strong piece. Otherwise I might forget all about it.

. . .

Matters of perspective

EP: Do you ever feel you have reached a point in your work where everything will be OK?

DVN: No. I’m always worried. I always think: is this collection any good? On the other hand, I also think it’s just clothes. You know, I teach once a year at the Antwerp fashion school, and I keep seeing students who really consider themselves an artist, and they are always explaining to me how their collection is about how someone from Poland meets the Russian hip-hop culture and the Jewish diaspora, and I think, “Oh, poor you, all that weight on your shoulders!”

EP: Young painters are the same. They feel they have to do everything. Maybe this is part of the connection between the two worlds.

. . .

Will fashion ruin art?

DVN: I’m always a little afraid that fashion will ruin the art world, especially now it has gotten so involved in all the art fairs, all the parties.

EP: But if art is any good, it has so much of a longer trajectory than one night. Contemporary art is separate from art openings. In the end, it depends on the strength of ideas in each piece. Fashion can’t ruin that.

DVN: What I love about art is that it becomes part of your interior world – it is absorbed, and reflects personality. By contrast, I have enormous respect for people who buy my garments and then make them their own, cut the arms off or whatever. But I’d guess it’s not the same for you.

EP: That’s true. I hope no one cuts the arms off my pieces.

 

[luckyme]

that was a very nice article, thanks for posting luluposh. different perspective than any others i have read, and how nice to hear the complimentary banter between two admiring artists.

 

[luckyme]

reminiscing....

tumbler/first view

 

[GERGIN]

Is that Milla in the first pic?!?!?

Sorry totally off topic, nice finds!

 

[HeatherAnne]

“Dries Van Noten: Inspirations” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris

The designer Dries Van Noten is known for doing things his own way.

For starters, he’s based in Antwerp, which hasn’t always been the fashionable town it is today. Dries has also set himself apart by defying what’s become the new industry standard of producing additional pre-collections twice a year; instead he releases new collections only in the spring and fall in order to allow for enough time to fully develop new prints, fabrics, colors and cuts. He is also the rare designer who simultaneously acts as CEO, with full ownership over the label he founded nearly 30 years ago. And the icing on this somewhat idiosyncratic cake? Dries happens to be a passionate gardener, which in our tech-obsessesed corner of world feels like a bit of an anachronism. In sum, he’s what we call an original—and for that very reason, Barneys is thrilled to partner with Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs in producing an exhibition examining his wholly unique creative process.

Dries Van Noten: Inspirations will run from March 1st to August 31st, and will feature nearly 200 pieces from the designer’s oeuvre as well as a number of paintings, textiles, garments and works of art that have been influential over the span of his career. Barneys has been there to bear witness to the majority of it; we were his first customer, buying the entire first collection in 1986 and standing by ever since. (Keep your eyes peeled come late March. We’ll be dedicating our Madison Avenue windows to him.)

“The relationship with Dries is special and rare because Dries himself is rare,” says Barneys CEO Mark Lee. “There are very few designers who have been in Barneys for 28 years and are still independently owned and working for the same brand they founded.”

“More importantly,” says Mr. Lee, “Dries remains vibrant and on a real roll with his creativity. He is often fresher and more modern than some designers just starting out.” Anyone who saw his men’s Autumn 2014 collection could agree. With inventive pattern play, softened silhouettes and a rather daring color scheme, Dries brought fresh eyes to the very concept of menswear.

Tempting as it may be to see this exhibition as some kind of summation of his brilliant career, it should be clear by now that the Dries story is far from finished, and surely the best is yet to come. But hey, don’t let that stop you from visiting this one-of-a-kind exhibit curated by a truly one-of-a-kind mind.

Dries Van Noten: Inspirations
March 1st to August 31st
Musée des Arts Décoratifs
PARIS

For more information about visting the exhibition, consult the Musée des Arts Décoratifs website.

barneys.com

 

[MulletProof]

sounds dreamy, cannot wait!

 

[Thefrenchy]

I'm terribly excited about this exhibition and will be there on the first day. I just hope that the way the will present his work will be good as the Musée des Arts Déco tends to be quite bad when it comes to lighting and showcasing silhouettes (anyone who's been to the LV exhibition will see what I mean).

 

[fritze]

Man, now I have the best excuse to go to Paris this spring, can't wait to see it! Is this normal for Barneys to collaborate with exhibitioners?

 

[gossiping]

oh wow i am going to paris at exactly this time, will definitely have to visit!

 

[Scott]

personally,i would find this far more interesting than seeing yet another endless parade of repetitive,unoriginal ideas at the défilés.

 

[Rosa Pulchra]

What an exciment to see more about this exhibition. He's one of my favourites.

 

[Melisande]

Totally agree with Scott.
Definitely going.

...with Mulletproof !

 

[MulletProof]

^ !!!!!!!!!