For goodness’ sake, wouldn’t it be amazing, liberating, and groundbreaking if a designer like Dries Van Noten would say: “Actually, I’ve got nothing much to say in a big runway-type way this season, so why doesn’t everyone come around to my place this time, and just have a look at my clothes?” This is not to deny or to diminish Van Noten’s business or its continuing relevance to women. The looks you’ll find at numbers 28, 25, 33, 53, and 54 are everything people look up to, and rely on him for, but this show was lengthy, and without the visual momentum fans hope for at runway shows to keep emotion surging.
To be freed up from showing his womenswear in the twice-annual ritual he’s established for himself, under the gilded stucco ceilings of the Hôtel de Ville—that would be a breakthrough. Perhaps that feeling was coded into the theme of the collection, Art Brut, and the repetitive choice of music—Deep Purple’s “Child in Time.” Art Brut, otherwise known as Outsider Art, is a lumped-in term for work by people who are untrained, and are often mentally ill—Jean Dubuffet first drew attention to it in the ’50s. By the ’70s, “alternative,” antiestablishment culture had almost made it mainstream and fashionable, and that was the psychedelic link Van Noten seemed to be making here: obsessively reiterated swirly hand-drawn ball-point patterns on the one hand, and a heavy prog-rock riff on the other.
Yes, the theme serviced the Van Noten brand requirement for prints, though they were narrow in bandwidth and repetitive. They also raised an uncomfortable question about the ethics of appropriating or imitating such an art source. Is it okay? Christopher Kane also recently used Art Brut, in Pre-Fall 2017, but he did it by going to the well-established Gugging art therapeutic center in Austria, engaging with the resident artists, and buying and crediting some work for his collection. Had Van Noten not released collection notes referring to Art Brut, perhaps this question wouldn’t have hung over the collection at all—no one would’ve made the connection. As it was, he didn’t want to discuss it further.
As in the past couple of seasons, Van Noten let it be known he wouldn’t be taking backstage interviews. That only leads to guesswork. Is he—like so many others of us—questioning the validity of the rigmarole of the runway show? Does he feel trapped by its so-called necessity? It’s odd: As a much-loved, much-respected independent designer, Van Noten could exercise his freedom to break away and show in other formats, exactly when and as the spirit moves him. He’s not an “Outsider” now: He’s the establishment mainstream. He should dare. Wherever he leads, his loyal followers will be there.
