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A year after Dries Van Noten presented his final collection, his successor Julian Klausner presented his men’s debut show this Thursday in Paris. He sent out paréo around the waist, evening tops with boat necklines, boxy silhouettes and plenty of cummerbunds.
“I was really thinking about the men’s Dries wardrobe. It’s a very complete wardrobe, going from day to evening to beach wear, all the accessories,” Klausner said after the show. “I always admired Dries for the way he balanced things together, and I lent myself to that exercise.”
It was a high-stakes show for the Puig-owned house. Dries Van Noten’s clientele is discerning fashion aficionados, meaning expectations would be high. Klausner, who was appointed to the creative director position in December, didn’t have much formal experience in menswear, having worked with Van Noten on the women’s collections since 2018. And of course, with a large wholesale distribution, Klausner also needed to successfully convince buyers of the brand’s new direction.
“Men’s is where Dries Van Noten started, so it’s a very important part of the expression of the brand,” Dries Van Noten president Axel Keller told Vogue Business before the show. (A member of the Antwerp Six collective, Dries Van Noten launched a men’s collection in Antwerp in 1986, and he presented his first womenswear runway in Paris in 1993.)
Today, women’s is bigger than men’s by revenue, but the men’s category is a significant share of the Dries Van Noten business (the brand doesn’t share the breakdown of sales by gender), and a strategic one. Keller says that men’s is particularly high performing in new Dries Van Noten stores. The house has been on a store opening spree lately, having opened stores in London, New York, Brussels, and it has reopened its Tokyo boutique. It counts 14 stores globally (and is set to open its 15th store in Milan). That includes three stores dedicated to beauty products, leather goods and jewellery. Puig doesn’t break down sales of individual brands. Dries Van Noten sits in its “niche”, which also includes Byredo and Penhaligon’s.
Klausner seemed unfazed by the challenge of moving into menswear when I spoke to him a few months ago. He said that while responsible for the women’s collections, he was also working with the menswear team. “ It’s a small studio. We are working closely. The overlap between men’s and women’s was always very much there.”
Backstage after the show, Klausner told journalists: “Dries’s men’s has always had touches of femininity. Women can be quite masculine, so I think that’s very much a part of the brand. One echoes the other; it balances each other out, or sometimes it contrasts. It really depends on the season, but I think the Dries world is very much one world across both men and women.”
And he delivered. Journalists and buyers alike praised his debut. “One of the reasons I think it’s so loved is that it’s entirely devoid of the urge to create a sensation for the sake of sensation,” said Esquire creative director Nick Sullivan. (Klausner chose an industrial, raw venue in the 12th arrondissement as his backdrop, so the focus was clearly on the collection. )
“I think this is a natural evolution for Dries’s menswear,” said David Martin, editor-in-chief of indie magazine Odda. “It feels fresh, feels young. He has deconstructed the saturated colours and patterns into pieces, making a new silhouette and proposal to new generations who will discover Dries Van Noten thanks to Julian,” Martin added, also praising the shoes, underpants and jackets.
Alice Feillard, head of men’s offer and buying at Galeries Lafayette, called it “one of the best shows of the fashion week so far”. “It was a sublime show, the DNA of Dries in a sharper version, clean and minimal, definitely modern and desirable,” she said.
As Klausner’s womenswear debut collection for AW25 is just starting to hit stores, Keller said that the most important point for the brand is continuity. “The transition has been embraced in a very positive way within the teams externally and also internally. It clearly feels that this is just the beginning of the second chapter of this beautiful house and the legacy Dries left us with.”
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