Fashion has a reputation for being cyclical. A designer debuts with fire and intensity, leads the avant garde briefly, settles into a comfort zone, then fades away, only to be revived as retro, if they're fortunate. So Dries Van Noten is an anomaly. Van Noten and five fellow Belgian designers stormed the salon in the late 1980s, showing their wares out of a van in London, but he has been growing and maturing for years. His quiet, artful and accessible aesthetic has grown in popularity since his first collection, enough that after two decades designing, he won the CFDA International Award in 2008. His collections don't often change direction radically from season to season, rather they shift slowly in nuance and texture. Over the last few seasons his men's designs have been fresh and modern to the extent that it's easy to forget that Van Noten got his formal design education in the 1970s.
Van Noten is now known for both women's and men's clothing, but he got his start with men's. Today, Van Noten's menswear is smart, carefully considered, and mature. He uses traditional, even folkish, printing and manufacturing techniques to make refined, innovative pieces. His clothing is global in scope and local in its appropriations, but not arts-and-crafts-style or provincial.
Read more His clothes often focus on themselves rather than on extending a collection-wide metaphor, and he has earned a reputation as a thinking man's designer.
The Fall 2010 Dries Van Noten collection includes a decent amount of clean, architectural tailoring (a hallmark of the designer, who comes from a family tradition of tailoring), hybrid pieces incorporating different fabrics in the body and sleeves, and contrast trim, as well as the bold patterning he is known for. Bright saturated blues in repp stripes mix with more subdued olive and khaki tones. Trousers are pegged or narrow at the hem--some use fleece and rib trim to fit as close to the leg as possible. As usual for Dries Van Noten, it marks a subtle shift that we're on board with.
Written by Pete Anderson» Shop Dries van Noten