Their eye sockets smeared with black grease, necks caught in purple feathered chokers, and hair gelled into marcel waves, a spine-chillingly elegant breed of women stalked the runway at Dries Van Noten. Who were they, with their air of aristocratic hauteur, and their vast wardrobes of black suits, spotless white piqué shirts, leopard-spot cloaks, gold lamé shoes, poison-green furs, arsenals of old-school sportswear, and ties skewered with pearl-topped pins? None other than the spirit amalgam of the extreme and morbid affair between the Marchesa Luisa Casati and the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. “They pushed decadence as a lifestyle, but were never happy,” Van Noten said backstage. “If you see the first look, that's her face and persona with his hair.”
The story of Casati, her penchant for keeping pet cheetahs, for draping herself in pearls, and at least once, appearing with a necklace of live snakes wreathed about her, has long enthralled fashion. As an early-20th-century femme fatale, she was also a patron of the Ballets Russes—so Stravinsky’s music, as well as a recording of D’Annunzio reading a poem, and the sound of a heartbeat, signifying the eternal chasing of sensation, filled the soundtrack.
Yet: Did anyone really need this explanation to appreciate the clothes? True, for those who are following all the threads of designers’ references to prewar culture, the ’30s and ’40s, Van Noten’s collection adds to the season’s dark tapestry of characters and is spot-on in that “fashion” sense. But the reason it actually stands out is because Van Noten is one designer who never allows research to tip his clothes over the line into costume. As ever, this collection is fully motivated by his focus on dressing intelligent, adult women. Inexplicably, even in the century when such huge purchasing wealth is concentrated in the hands of successful women over the age of 40, only a handful of luxury fashion designers give a single thought to dressing them. With this collection, from its impeccable tailored coats, its pantsuits, cricket sweaters, dressing gown, and pajamas, right through to the narrow black velvet gown curiously decorated with an abstracted snakeskin-patterned skein of green sequins, Van Noten gave his legion of customers every reason to buy here, and search no further.
