Dries Van Noten gave his show a name: The Woman Who Dares to Cut Her Own Fringe. “This means for me audacity, but also considered… She is in one way really tender but also very strong.” This too: “It’s about style and not so much about fashion.”
For nearly 40 years Van Noten has been about style more than fashion. His collections are recognizable from season to season despite the fact that his m.o. has always been to combine unlikely things: florals with army fatigues, say, or, in the case of fall 2024: gray marl sweatshirt fabric with iridescent sequins, and lavender silk duchess with faded denim jeans.
The show started with a camel coat, double-breasted with a stand-up collar and rounded sleeves, but its neutral minimalism was a ruse. Though there were excellent dark suits, this was a collection of many colors, often in surprising pairings or trios, even better if Van Noten could add strange textures ranging from shaggy fur-like mohairs to tinselly metallics. “It’s trial and error,” he said. “There is no process and there is especially not a system. The last thing that I want is a system because then it feels organized. These things need to happen in a very spontaneous way.” The only rule was a requirement to break the rules.
Emphasizing that sense of spontaneity, zip-up hoodies were worn with one sleeve off and wrapped around the neck like a scarf and button-downs were shown back-to-front, the collars popped under stretchy nylon shirts. The offbeat, irreverent mix was the thing, but he also made a point of saying, “every piece has to stand on its own. It’s important that it’s not just looking nice when it’s an outfit, every piece has to have its value.”
The prints and embroideries that are his signatures weren’t as foregrounded as usual, but they weren’t absent. Jumbles of crystal fringe turned a pair of black trousers into party pants; and they also turned up, a little more surprisingly, on a natty checked suit. “She decides what is daywear, what is eveningwear, and she combines all those things together; you have high and low, mixed even further than we’ve dared to go in the past,” he said. Come to think of it, the long fringy bangs nearly covering the models’ eyes were the only uniform things about the show. Not many of his peers staring down a similar milestone can say the same thing.
