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Dries Van Noten

Spring 2023 RTW

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Properties

Date: September 28, 2022
Location: Paris, France
Looks: 64
Brand: Dries Van Noten
URL: wwd.com

Critic Reviews

By Booth Moore for WWD

Bloom therapy.

That’s what Dries Van Noten’s spring 2023 collection felt like as it unfolded from an all-black beginning, to a softer middle, then exploded into a beautiful riot of florals that was a master class in mixing prints.

“I thought maybe we have to start from black, really the essence, the base of what fashion and clothes are — pleating, volume, structures, then to introduce the same volumes going from stiff and hard to softer, fluid versions. The shapes in fact stayed the same, so it’s the same lexicon,” the designer said during a preview.

The storyline, or rather three storylines, could be a metaphor for our times, he mused.

“On the one hand you want protection but on the other hand you want to show your softer side.”

So there was all-black cocooning outerwear and sharp tailoring with jeweled buttons and pins, or a gorgeous sleeveless top pin-tucked to hourglass precision over a party decoration of a skirt in textured, layered plisse like only van Noten can make them.

Then he introduced more softness in a stripped back way — oversize tailoring in Sweetart hues with a relaxed, Nineties-looking swagger, color-blocked slip dresses with matte sequined color fields, slouchy shirting with pleated corsages, draped jersey skirts and faded pastel baggy fringed denim.

But it was the flower fest that really brightened the room — and no wonder: van Noten has one of the best color and print senses of any designer working today, a legacy stretching far back that he was happy to celebrate.

He referenced the ‘90s here, too. It’s an era he knows well, having first launched his women’s collection in 1993. But he put his own spin on the transparent second skin layers, snug shirting, baby cardigans, cargo pants and duster coats that are back on the streets now.

He did it by expertly mixing florals of different scales and adding lots of textures with crushed and pleated fabrics, georgette garlands, giant blooms and snaking ruffles. Handcrafted silk cord macrame tunics and overskirts, tubular glass jewelry, curved brass heels and frilled shoes added touches of craft and whimsy.

What does Dries miss from the ’90s?

“I’ve never been nostalgic, but now, with all that’s happening in the world, I get a little bit scared of the future,” he said. “But all my team is young people and they want to be optimistic, they don’t want to hear the past was so much better.”

The runway must roll on.

By Luke Leitch for Vogue

When a designer says the collection is about optimism, it usually pays to be pessimistic. That theme is so broad, so inchoate, and so intangible that it eludes all but the rarest efforts to capture even a scintilla of its elusive essence in clothing.

Today’s Dries Van Noten show, the designer’s first womenswear runway sortie in 30 months, was an exception. It not only reflected optimism but stirred it too. Rigorously structured to achieve its sumptuously effective objective, this was a 64-look detox that flushed away fashion circuit ennui. It left us clapping like giddy seals.

We began sunk in inky darkness, lining a rough concrete room illuminated only by the glow of phones. The lights came up on a series of all-black looks. Van Noten said he’d been thinking of Malevich’s 1915 painting The Black Square, an infinitely readable and to many terrifying abstract black vacuum. But these looks were no void: By enforcing the rigidly all-black rule, Van Noten forced us to consider the texture, structure, and silhouettes, all highly designed, that passed us. These started with an oversized jacket in a technical, spongey, mesh material that was fastened with a glass-headed pin to create a furled, succulent gather. Tailoring pieces bore the precise suture of surgically applied darting. Slowly, against this structure, emerged a tentative undergrowth of decorative foliage: a ruffle bag trailing fringe, a floral brocade on a fitted dress with a tendril of ruffled jersey on the right shoulder, a ruffled shoe worn beneath a soft-shouldered jacket with a bomber jacket hem, a fringe-hem coat. Then an eruption of fractal, myriad pleated ruffles encrusted like some dark barnacle on a T-shirt dress, and at last the first glimpse of color in layers of indigo paillettes on a crop top.

Phase two introduced color, mostly pale and washed at first, in rustling paillette pieces, and some extraordinarily embellished cotton jersey T-shirts and skirts. Some of that color seems reduced in reproduction: The burgundy ruffle-petal skirt of look 26 looked far richer to the eye than in the gallery here. Van Noten reinforced many of the black-section motifs but added fresh elements via macramé overshirts and fabrics textured with chaotic wrinkling.

The third phase leading to crescendo came, inevitably by now, with the injection of floral patterns against the previously established color and structure. These patterns were drawn and then redrafted from past Van Noten collections and mashed sumptuously against each other. Florals for spring? Yes, but also groundbreaking for the highly cultivated tempo and intellectual timbre of their contextual delivery. More basically, you wanted to wear it, or shoot it, or buy it for someone to delight in. And because of that slow build of all that had preceded it, you could appreciate the composite elements beneath the dazzling pattern. So, to recap, what was that theme again, Dries? “Optimism,” he replied. “Because life can be really beautiful. You have the colors; you have the flowers…” So let’s smell them? “Absolutely!”