When you’re presenting your 99th show—meaning, you’ve seen it all, and survived (nay, flourished) since Ronald Reagan was in the White House—what would your instinctive reaction be, now? Dries Van Noten’s gut told him to go back to basics, gather his compadres around him, and hunker down in an old stomping ground. “I wanted it to be grounded,” he said. Partly, it was a matter of looking back at the past 30 years or so, but he was remarkably unsentimental about what that meant. “You start thinking about what you want to take with you into the future,” he said.
Van Noten held his Fall 2017 men’s show in an underground tunnel in the hardscrabble Porte de Versailles area he’d first used in 1993, and again in 1996. Those were the key years when the Belgian designers of the Antwerp Six—the emerging talents from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp—were in the creative ascent. Now, Van Noten and Walter Van Beirendonck (who showed yesterday) are some of the only two remaining members of that art school cohort who are independently in operation: Ann Demeulemeester retired, and even honorary member Martin Margiela faded anonymously and deliberately into a private life after selling his brand to the company behind Diesel. As an independent, though, Van Noten has been by far and away the most successful of them all. He’s done that all along by being real. With this show, perhaps he wanted to remind people—or maybe himself—of that.
Plain-speaking, good-looking archetypal clothes for normal guys with a taste for proper cloth was the name of the game here. The show opened with one of the quintessential greatcoats of a greatcoat season, roomy in the shoulder, wide in the lapel, made in durable khaki worsted wool. It looked like a coat which might have been inherited from a generation back, and might last a couple more. Only now, it was being worn without ceremony, by a young guy in jeans and Dr. Martens (well, the Van Noten boot equivalent).
That outfit was the keynote for a collection which flashed back to the uniforms of mods and skinheads, to ’60s Beatles fans and Bowie devotees circa his early-’80s Serious Moonlight tour. Tweaked proportions were the nub of it—bigger tops, with narrow trousers, generally, apart from the voluminous Bowie pleated pants with a tucked-in white shirt. Knitwear was big, too, running from riffs on oversize Fair Isles to take-offs on Peruvian sweaters (one had its traditional frieze of llamas picked out in jet beads).
In the end, Van Noten couldn’t hold back from flashing his audience some embellishment and embroidery (flowers on the shoulder of a checked tweed suit, for instance). More curiosity-provoking, though, was the alternative decoration in this collection: the blown-up brand labels of his cloth suppliers, tweed mills, knitwear, and cashmere producers, which were sewn as patches or printed onto sweaters or quilted sweatshirts. These traditional companies have hailed from Scotland and the West Country of England for as long as anyone can remember. They are now fighting for survival. It was honorable of Van Noten to big them up.
