Dries Van Noten cast a haunting melancholy over his excellent Fall show. “A wry feeling,” he said. “A strangeness.” The power of it was that he’d elegantly answered contradictory longings: for tailoring on the one hand, and the yearning for color and escapism on the other. There were flower prints, a Dries Van Noten house speciality, but this time they were from his house, literally: “We picked them from my garden last October and photographed them,” he said. “I wanted roses but not sweet roses—roses with an edge, roses for now. Flowers can be romantic, but this I wanted to take out, because the times are tougher than in the past. So you see the diseases, the black spot, the imperfections.”
He opened with definitively elegant pantsuits in gray, top to toe. The first model, in a belted charcoal pinstriped jacket and trousers, carried a matching pinstriped puffer stole over one forearm, with matching pointed pinstriped high-heeled pumps, long black leather gloves, and a black leather clutch. She and the similarly gray-on-gray-clad women who followed had an almost stately aura about them. Van Noten let that sink in for a while before he showed a single flower.
But when he did start introducing them—with a single peach rose with blackened leaves, printed across the breast of a gray shirt—there was something pleasingly off about it all. The odd, nearly clashing mauves, pastel greens, and yellows; the way some of the double-layered printing, on a veil and the garment beneath, messed with your vision. There were satin coats and high-necked, long-sleeved shifts; a shockingly purple padded coat; what looked like the yellow leaves of a whole acer tree vibrating on a black satin coat. A print of Kniphofia—the red hot poker plant—reared up from a hemline and then pollinated a weirdly yellow and orange-tipped fake-fur wrap and bag.
There was what we saw, and then what we felt; a strange atmosphere of melancholia evoked by the words of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” with intermittent, harsh passages of Belgian accordion music. It was in a concrete basement space, and the music hinted at a fin-de-siècle rawness; the impression that we were watching this display of elegance in a bunker couldn’t be pushed away.
It was Dries Van Noten at his reassuring best as one of the few designers who can be solidly relied on to back women up with a fully resolved, thought-out wardrobe for living through, no matter what. Much as he can evoke a mood, tune in to the changing times, signal artistic awareness, he is also a great pragmatist. He will have all bases covered in a collection, paying proper attention to office attire—maybe political office, why not?—as well as opening up a spectrum of evening dressing. Brilliant strokes came our way there: a long black column with a side drape sprinkled in gold and silver microbeads; a gold glitter trouser suit with a sheer veil thrown over it; the stunning black tuxedo that bookended the show with an identical silhouette to the opener.
A video was later emailed to the press showing Van Noten and his team at work in his garden in Antwerp, Belgium—up ladders and in borders snipping flowers. And what a palatial garden, with its lawns and huge box hedges, one might say! The point of the exercise, he said, was “to have everything authentic. You see the shadows of the flowers behind them, just as we shot them on the canvas backdrops on that day.” Including the shadows—that was the frisson in this highly personal, highly applicable collection. Plenty of women of the world will be praying that Dries Van Noten doesn’t go off to spend more time in his gardens for a long while yet.
