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PARIS, France — Dries Van Noten's next presentation, his women's show in March, will be his 100th. The men's collection he showed on Thursday night was already a reflection on what he planned to carry forward to his next 100. It was based on what he called menswear archetypes: jeans, a khaki coat, a navy coat, a ski jacket, blanket checks, ethnic-patterned knits and more.
Like a musician with a massive repertoire, Van Noten has been remixing his own past for a while now. The second jacket on his catwalk revisited a silhouette from 1986. And, if the broad-shouldered jackets and coats and oversized outerwear that followed occasionally looked touched by the Demna Effect, all of them were, in fact, re-edits of older Dries items. “But I didn’t want a collection of archive pieces,” the designer pointed out. “I wanted a feeling for the future, for optimism.”
The show certainly surged along on a wave of energy. Iggy Pop's Lust for Life tends to have that effect. "The song meant a lot for me," Van Noten said. It also evoked so much more: Berlin in the 1970s, London in the 1980s, Trainspotting in the 1990s. They all echoed throughout the collection. There was a hard edge that was something new for Van Noten. None of his signature embroideries or jacquards, instead, jeans rolled a la skinhead, plain white shirts, plain black jackets, utilitarian nylons, the emphasis on strong shape rather than rich decoration. It felt defiant – and that certainly felt right for now.
But, this being a Dries Van Noten collection, there had to be at least one indulgence of fancy. It came in the form of a shout-out to his fabric producers and suppliers, their labels writ large on items cut from their cloth, woven from their fibres. Like the sweater in a vermilion Shetland wool from Jamieson&Smith, or the melton coat whose back bore the name Hainsworth, which makes the coats for the guards at Buckingham Palace, or the sweatshirt branded Toki-Sen, the Japanese company whose mills wove the cotton. "Some of our suppliers are small businesses that struggle to survive," said Van Noten. The acknowledgement was a typically decent gesture.
