Dries Van Noten after Dries. It’s a hard pill to swallow. But, following his final bow at his eponymous label’s menswear show back in June, the internal design team has delivered a joyous womenswear collection that not only honoured his legacy, but magnified it through a vibrant lens.
Fluid in the founder’s design language, the team worked to reinterpret his identifiable codes through an intoxicating array of prints – leopard, snake, fawn, floral and abstract. Coming in muddied, summer colours from blood red and violet to chartreuse and fuschia – there were slinky skirts and structured jackets. A fun step forward for the brand, lots of the looks were cinched in in strategically flattering places or draped in body-engulfing swaths of silk and lined with lace. Straight, cigarette trousers were worn with brocade blousons, eccentrically beaded hot pants or knee-length skirts with slouchy knit shirts, and tuxedo jackets were tucked into paper-bag trousers.
Jewellery was a high point, with spatterings of silver appearing in strange, warped shapes across necklaces, brooches and earrings, as models walked on angular heels in the same intriguing prints as the clothes.
It was still Dries, just new. A step toward the future.
Photography courtesy of Dries Van Noten.
driesvannoten.com