Dries Van Noten may have taken his last runway bow, but he’s still very much involved in the brand that bears his name. Since the start of the year, in fact, he’s overseen the interior design of no fewer than five new Dries Van Noten store projects, including one on Hanover Square in London that opened earlier this month and another on Mercer Street in New York that’s been welcoming customers for just about 48 hours. A sixth, in Milan, will come this fall. “It’s been busy,” he confirms on a Zoom call from his home in Antwerp.
The Mercer Street opening follows what Van Noten described as a “15-year” search for the right New York location. That means the hunt began long before Barneys, Van Noten’s original US stockist, closed its doors for good in 2020, but if it was a long time coming it was also worth the wait. “The location I think is really good,” he says. Indeed, his neighbors on the block are Alaïa, Balenciaga, Marni, and Khaite. “And the volume makes it quite special. It’s narrow: just six meters wide, but it’s 30 meters deep, and it’s seven meters high. And the basement is also really high, which is where we’ll put menswear. An opportunity like this—we said, ‘okay, let’s go for it.’”
Beyond aligning with the house team, including Julian Klausner, his former right-hand and the brand’s new creative director, who made his runway debut in early March, Van Noten was responsible for collecting antiques for the store with his husband Patrick Vangheluwe “to make the mix that we like.” (He’s still involved with the company’s beauty projects, as well.)
“Every store for us has to be special,” he explains. “It’s not that we have a formula that we want to apply in every city in the world. We really listen to the building and the city we’re in.” The Hanover Square store in London is in a former bank. “It’s quite English,” with David Hockney and Tracey Emin pieces on the walls. The only word for New York, says Van Noten, is monumental. “It feels more like a theater.” Visitors will see French and English paintings dating to the 16th century, a pair of torchères from the late Iris Apfel’s collection, and Italian tables from the 1960s. Most captivating of all, promises Van Noten, are pieces by the Belgian artist Ben Storms. “He’s making things in marble and crushed aluminum which are absolutely stunning.” At the back of his space, there’s a gold-leafed wall that will conjure memories of his final show last June, where the runway was silver-leafed. “It’s very daring,” says Van Noten.
It was five years ago, in the first Covid summer, that the designer opened his Los Angeles store—“we were very brave to do that in the middle of the pandemic, but I thought it worked out very well,” he says. As with the La Cienega space, which featured a section devoted to archive resale, a vinyl room for records, and a Little House for exhibitions, his fingerprints are all over the new Mercer store. “I think you clearly see that I was involved, and I really like to play with that. I think it’s different ways of looking at my aesthetic.”
The news of the Mercer Street opening was met with peals of delight at the Vogue offices. So might this tidbit, vague for the moment but nonetheless intriguing, from Van Noten: “We have another project, which Patrick and I are working on now really hard, and which we think that we can start to communicate later this year.” It’s entirely separate from the Dries Van Noten brand, a PR rep elaborated. Stay tuned.
