British Vogue’s fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen breaks down the five biggest takeaways from Dries Van Noten’s spring/summer 2022 collection.
Just because Dries Van Noten is sticking to the digital format for now doesn’t mean he’s not optimistic about the future. In a season that’s seen a big return to the live runway, he commissioned film-maker Albert Moya and the photographer Rafael Pavarotti to capture in moving and still imagery a collection devoted to lifting the spirits. “I think that’s what we really need: something uplifting. It was a word we used a lot. It had to be joyful, powerful, fun,” he said on a video call from Antwerp. Investigating post-pandemic behaviour, the designer zoned in on festivals: “Places where you share emotions but individuality is equally as important.” From Burning Man to Tomorrowland, he landed in Holi, the Indian festival where people throw brightly coloured pigment on each other as a symbol of new beginnings.
Van Noten has travelled a lot in India, but never made it to the Holi festival. “I’m always too early or too late. Once, I arrived in Calcutta one day late, and it was quite something because I was staying in a house with a lot of geese walking around the garden, and they were still turquoise, yellow, fuchsia… all the colours of festival! It’s an image I’ll never forget,” he laughed. He adapted that palette to a trippy collection, which had been as uplifting to create as it was to look at. “It’s light-hearted. It’s not so complicated. That was something that really spoke to me: let’s make a super bold collection and just go for it,” he said. “It was a whole season of experimentation, playing around with volumes.”
In order to avoid his sea of colour looking “easy or cheap”, Van Noten amped up his fabrication, creating a wealth of tactile textures that lent themselves to movement. Jacquards, fil-coupés and fake furs made from silk brought the fringe factor, while silk nylon mimicked the look of ostrich skin and bubble-wrap. Playing with smocking – the technique through which elastic threads give different tensions to cloth and pull it in different directions – Van Noten sculpted dresses into volumes that look like those of haute couture. Fabric printed with a picture of a crowd from a festival was smocked and shaped into a dress with a cascading ruffle down the décolletage and bell cuffs. “Couture is always on my mind,” he said. “It’s been a hell of a job, but it’s come out super light.”
Inspired as his digital presentation was, did it feel strange to Van Noten not to be part of IRL fashion week? “It’s quite strange to look at other fashion shows. I’m quite shocked when I see the public sitting there close to each other, without wearing face masks. It feels a little bit too early to do that,” he said. “Backstage with 50 models, 50 make-up artists, 30 hairdressers, 30 nail artists, all the dressers, all crammed together in a space without ventilation? Forget it. Too early.” In contrast, he’d relished in his own process: “Our shoot took place over three days, and every day we talked about the results of the previous day and how we could still go further with it: the hair became wider, the nails became longer, the photos got more movement. I really enjoyed that.”
But he will return to the runway
Will Dries Van Noten ever stage a fashion show again? “I think so. I never said I was never going to do a fashion show again, only that I wasn’t going to do it until we no longer have to think about social distancing, masks and things like that. Fashion shows are somewhere you have to show emotion and see people’s faces, and I want to see people and think about something else than health and safety. If it’s okay at the beginning of next year, why not, I look forward to doing a show,” he teased. “But I don’t like the idea of picking up where we stopped. We have to review the idea of the fashion show.”
Editor
Anders Christian MadsenCredit
Lead image: Courtesy of Dries Van Noten
