Paris menswear has been tangibly hormonal this season, and until now nowhere more so than Dries Van Noten. (Although Rick Owens ran him pretty darned close.) Asked to put out his rationale for this collection, Van Noten consented with gusto: “It’s about enjoying clothes, dressing: using your sexual power to feel great.”
For season after season and year after year Van Noten has been reliably great, which is what earned him such a reputedly lucrative arrangement with Puig in 2018. However, where a sudden and massive cash injection seems to act on many designers as a profound creative sedative, in Van Noten it has proved to be a galvanizing stimulant. Last season’s menswear show was unreal, and the women’s tie-up with Lacroix was a bona fide historic moment.
For this evening’s show we were back in the wonderful vaulted concrete chasm of a space that hosted that Lacroix moment, and which will be Van Noten’s show home for a while to come. As advertised it was hot, hot, hot. Van Noten said he’d been inspired by the heft and lift of the shoes in that Lacroix-partnered collection to import their elevation into the menswear. “It’s a feeling really, strong power is really something which we like to enjoy. And then you see that also when you look into the New York Dolls, not really being transgender, but using women’s clothes for men.”
Of course the fox furs (all fake) and jewels (we didn’t ask) with which he garlanded his men have not always been archetypally feminine. Back in the 16th century they were very alpha male indeed, more recently alpha female, while here they were alpha everything. Some garments and accessories seemed pitched to create a friction (and with it a rise in temperature) between gender signifiers: a pair of raw denim jeans with a rhinestone belt, a check wool shirt with more flashing crystals beaded into the shoulder, a tailored jacket and a sweatshirt both stimulated from banal to bravura by the drape afforded via crystal pin.
The boxing boots and the luridly metallic-toned pants were developed from thoughts of Mexican wrestling attire. There was animalia galore—that straightforward emblem of tooth and claw appetite—both in print and the tiger images on a pant and camp collar shirt. There were also a lot of loose silk pants and to a lesser extent shirting, the sensual mellifluousness of whose material wafted breathily against the stronger, harder pieces around them.
These included many straightforward menswear classics, beautifully rendered and hiding in plain sight. The military bomber and parka, the long check overcoats, the burnished brown leather jacket, and the crombie were all hot stuff for outerwear lovers. Re-thought Hawaiian-style prints on puffers, shirting, shorts, and pants, plus typically vibrant knits completed a collection that climaxed with some crystal-set lilac silk boxing shorts and a rush of warmly appreciative applause.
