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Dries Van Noten

Fall 2022 RTW

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Properties

Date: March 2, 2022
Location: Paris, France
Looks: 51
Brand: Dries Van Noten
URL: wwd.com

Critic Reviews

By Booth Moore for WWD

The house of Dries Van Noten came to life, literally, in a circa 1780, delightfully decrepit maison on the Left Bank.

The designer chose a presentation format for his fall collection on Wednesday, creating a mysterious scene, Disneyland style, with heavily made-up mannequins populating the grand staircase, the dining room, even the bathroom in the five-story space. (Inspired by architect/furniture designer Carlo Mollino’s legendary Torino apartment, and the trove of eery Polaroids of half-naked women in classical poses found there after his death, the designer said.)

“We didn’t want to make it too comfortable,” Van Noten said mischievously, leading guests up the stairs past a red velvet upholstered elevator containing a pair of cast-off heels and a scarf.

The intimate setting was all the better to showcase his big news of the week: The launch of his first cosmetics and fragrance collection, inspired by his famous home garden in Antwerp.

The perfume flacons, which are refillable, are objets of beauty themselves, with carved wood, hand-painted porcelain and engraved metal bottles, and names like Voodoo Chile, Rock the Myrrh and Raving Rose. “I really wanted to dress the fragrances,” he explained, showing off the display.

Also showcased, his alluring new lipsticks. “It was really how much pigment can you put in a lipstick,” the designer said, twisting open a tube of fuchsia as dense as velvet as evidence.

Obviously, Van Noten loves a diva, and this season he was feeling Mina Mazzini, the Italian songstress, now 81, who has been at work for more than 50 years. The star’s dramatic makeup and flamboyant style are not for wallflowers, but one only has to look at the costume party happening outside all the fashion shows this month to know how sympatico Van Noten’s reference is to the times.

The quickest and easiest way to dress up may be with a statement coat, and Van Noten had loads of them, with exaggerated rounded shoulders and nipped waists, or long, slim silhouettes, and animal prints galore. A slim wool chenille, silk and Lurex zebra coat was gorgeous over fluid red velvet trousers and a disco ball of an allover crystal embroidered robe coat with a playful shearling collar would bring the party no matter where one goes.

A gold jacquard trenchcoat with tromp l’oeil fold effects was another special piece, as was a black jacket with pony hair laser cut into a rose motif. And a textured leather sequin coat had a superb lightness, while a bomber with a painterly skeletal design was reminiscent of one of Mollino’s skeleton tables.

Continuing the interiors theme, Van Noten revealed a cabinet of curiosities filled with treasures, including glittering beaded butterfly-shaped collars, a bomber jacket encrusted in twinkling sequins, and to-die Chinese blue porcelain court shoes. Made of crackle printed lacquer, they definitely fall into the category of “to wear or display?”

Tailoring was masculine-inspired with feminine flourishes; a black blazer with shoulder seams edged in crystals, had a chunky jeweled brooch for a fastening, and a long line, double-breasted tweed suit looked cool with a miniskirt attached to the creased trousers.

Dresses concealed and revealed, and everyday pieces popped with color. A drip-dot dalmatian print silk dress with a keyhole front came layered over a red leather turtleneck for a hint of eroticicm, while silk shirts, trousers and draped jersey skirts were worn in clashing makeup shades of red, hot pink and purple.

With the beauty launch, then seeing the Dries Van Noten world come to life in situ, could the next stop be a home collection? It’s prime time.

By Sarah Mower for Vogue

Dries van Noten was hosting a houseful of decadent ’70s Parisian squatters. At least that’s the feeling that began to creep over you as you climbed the stairs and walked across the creaking parquet floors of the dilapidated Hotel de Guise. In this mansion belonging to an old French family, the clock apparently stopped 50 years ago.

Instead of live people, there were mannequins grouped in paneled rooms as if in conversation, leaning watching over bannisters, discovered in a bathroom, glimpsed in a closet, standing on tables or suddenly, disconcertingly, seated on the attic stairs.

In other words: this was Dries Van Noten in his element, curating an interior environment instead of a fashion show. It was the perfect setting for absorbing the novel shock of suddenly being able to see and touch the richly layered textures of his collection again—and to sense a distinct frisson of darkness and perversity in the air.

Or was it his perfume—the whiff of Cannabis Patchouli, with a note of Raving Rose from the room which exhibited his new line of fragrances? A scent and lipstick launch which were part of Van Noten’s ‘experiential’ comeback, and felt like a tangible resurgence of the sensuality that was denied during the pandemic.

Perhaps that’s also why Van Noten’s clothes looked so sumptuous: the animal print coat layered over deep crimson silk-velvet trousers, the way he threw together glam holographic sequins with denim trousers and a wildly nubbly wool scarf. How ’40s dresses dripped with lines of stones, and entire wunderkammers of collaged jewelry were suspended from leather-chokered necks.

Had he found himself designing more intensely, more richly, during the closed-in times? “No.” Van Noten replied, flatly. “It is always like this. You just never see it when it’s up on a runway.” He’s been one of the increasingly few hold-outs against convening physical shows this season— and one of the few who really adapted to exercising the creative possibilities of fashion filmmaking. Using the half-way house of this expressive presentation was something else, fully playing into his multiple talents as a curator of exhibitions, antique interiors aficionado, gardener (which connects with the perfumes) and being the Belgian guy with the Antwerpian memories of alternative parties in the ’70s and raves in the ’90s.

He makes a very good point: “I think it’s that whole tactile moment. It’s not that I don't want to go back to fashion shows, because I think it's another thing, but this is really nice to experience. This way of presenting creates closeness; the fact that you can explain things, touch things, see things. You can stage it so that you can tell more stories than in a fashion show. So for me, it was a very interesting way of thinking.”

So, to the “story.” Van Noten had been researching the work of Carlo Mollino, the Italian architect and photographer whose life spanned surrealism and the ’70s. “After he died, erotic Polaroids he had taken of women, nude and semi-dressed, were found in his apartment.” Look them up, and you find how Van Noten had come up with the early-’70 maxi-coat shapes, the leather chokers, the ‘kinky’ lace-up boots.

He also put his finger on another popular ’70s cult object—a down-padded jacket with a deep tubular edge (the original version of which is now in the V&A collection, identified as being by Charles James, thanks to to my colleague Hamish Bowles.) Puffy volumes gone glamorous, circle shapes and other extreme geometries are part of the avant-garde news from Paris. Somehow, while staying within his own world, speaking to his own customers and bringing his whole character to creating his beauty/lifestyle lines, Dries Van Noten still has ways of clocking what’s happening outside.