Many designers seem to be running into difficulty over how to approach women this Fall, dividing their collections schizophrenically between sober-sided sellers and artistic gestures of the sort they hope magazine editors will put on their pages. Dries Van Noten has no such conflicts: He doesn t have to cast about for a "realistic" attitude because that, and never made-for-editorial fireworks, is what his business is based on.
It s given him the authority to respond to the times with a relaxed elegance that many women will identify with. It boils down to simple suggestions: an easy-fitting blazer to slip over a blouse and fluid pants; a draped day dress; a sweater to wear over a long skirt for evening. The show opened and closed with belted camel coats (an item that might turn out to be the sartorial symbol of this recession s sudden shift in aesthetics), but the strange color combinations in between threw off any feeling of dullness. Van Noten had taken the shades of Francis Bacon s paintings—shrimp pink, beige, ocher, orange, and mauve—and deployed them in a way that gave life to pieces that might have seemed boring in other hands.
While there was nothing overtly retro in it, the undercurrent was of the day-to-day glamour women in Europe and America mustered for themselves while facing the privations of World War II. It was there in the horn-rimmed sunglasses and the Eisenhower jackets, and the template of making the best of oneself in "good" simple clothes, with a slash of orange-red lipstick to keep up morale. All that was subtly reinforced by the long, streetlike runway, which was reflected in a two-story-high mirror that gave an angled overhead view, as if from an office-block window: an impression of a legion of city women pressing on with their lives, come what may.
