Dries Van Noten is speaking with wry cheerfulness about how COVID-19 has made him rewire the design habit of a lifetime. “You know how fond I was of fashion shows? The whole collection was built up around the idea of putting it on a catwalk. But this time, it was thinking about clothes for a shoot.” With a runway out of the question, Van Noten found himself in the completely new territory of directing photographs and a film. That’s a first in a 34-year career. “Because we’ve never had an advertising campaign. We lost things, but we learned things. It’s pushing a new kind of creativity.”
Another first is the fact that Van Noten has amalgamated his women’s and men’s collections into one—a process of rationalization (cost reducing, too), which was already underway before the pandemic. When you dive into the photographs—partly shot on a breezy day on a Rotterdam beach—the design symbiosis makes total sense: board shorts, Bermudas, easy cotton jackets worn by both boys and girls. “We wanted to work around beauty [that] evokes energy—not one that makes you dream or linger on things that are past, which makes you nostalgic,” he says. “It had to push you to the future, to give energy.”
Van Noten asked the Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen to shoot the images and film. “She captures the moment in a very good way. There’s a directness and she works fast and spontaneously.” Sassen is in the Netherlands, not far from Van Noten’s Antwerp base. Creative groups banding together to make fashion imagery happen locally is becoming a super-interesting phenomenon in every country now. So when it came to making the film, the socially distanced crew moved into a studio in Amsterdam, and the models started dancing in front of what looks curiously like a ’60s-type light show, or possibly some sort of neo-rave type of thing.
In fact, the source is the very much earlier work of the New Zealand artist Len Lye, whose pioneering technique of painting on celluloid film predates psychedelia by decades. “He was such a discovery for me. He started to do this in the late ’20s, early ’30s.” Working with the Len Lye Foundation, Van Noten developed the prints that run through the collection, “psychedelic sun, sunshine and moons, light bars, and palm trees.” And quite brilliant effects they are, for a designer whose innovation must always move forward through print—the attraction for his art-conscious customers—and through pragmatism.
Tough as the times may be, Van Noten has all the elements empathetically calibrated for what people might want to look and feel like next summer. There are jackets made of “two layers of cotton [that] are foiled and slightly padded, very soft, nice to touch”; black papery cotton dresses with cutout necklines; an oversized parka printed inside and out with a new inkjet technique; lots more. Van Noten is never one to hype or overstate any situation. He might, one suspects, even have enjoyed some of the ways the creative chips are falling in the face of the 2020 emergency. “I’m quite happy,” he reflected. “The limitations are not always limitations for me anymore.”
