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Show Report: Dries Van Noten A/W 16 Menswear

by Lou Stoppard on 22 January 2016

Lou Stoppard Dries Van Noten's A/W 16 menswear collection.

Lou Stoppard Dries Van Noten's A/W 16 menswear collection.

With Dries Van Noten, one feels it is just about the clothes. He’s a rare designer in that sense. There’s no star-studded front row. No careful product-placement on the red carpet. No arty campaign shot by a ‘must-have’ photographer. He does things his way, and relatively quietly. That said, despite all this, he does have a penchant for showmanship. One feels it’s the one area where he lets himself play. For A/W 16 he’d invited us to the imposing and breathtaking Palais Garnier, the home of the Paris Opera, to see his collection. We sat on the stage, rather than in the seats, giving us an insight into some of the backstage affairs - the lighting, the sets and so on. We saw the workings  - a far cry from the usual ‘luxury’ shows where nothing is out of place and everything is glossy. But that’s apt for this collection - it was about the humble mixed with the opulent. The traditional, specifically uniform, and the modern. The elegant and the awkward. The flamboyant and the familiar. Perhaps, because of the setting, I read it as a musing on the divide between the onstage and the offstage - what one wears to perform, and what one wears to rehearse, what’s the main act, and what’s just there for support. But isn’t that how we all put together our wardrobes - key pieces, alongside everyday staples? This sense of mixing informed the way sections of coats had been attached to trousers, to create one garment, and the way military insignias were removed from their usual garments and placed on sweaters, hoodies and parkas. Seemingly basic, uniform hues, were clashes with dramatic dandyish shades; rich yellow, regal purple. Elsewhere, psychedelic poster graphics by Wes Wilson, reworked by the American artist himself, nodded to that sense of performance. They also added to the general sense of mixing in the way they combined his work from the thirties - and also suggestions of that era’s peace movement - with the hippy feel so synonymous with the seventies.

One could read a lot into this presentation. You could spin a narrative from the way Van Noten choose an opera house in the first place. Fashion is, after all, a centre for theatre, performance and showing off. One could also make much of the fact that, as the show began, a curtain lifted to reveal the photographers pit, as if the snappers where the main act - they do say, after all, that image is the most important thing in fashion today. But to read into this would be to miss the point - the only act was the clothes. That’s the point with Dries - there’s no additional performance, no smoke and mirrors. He sells what he shows. He, for the most part, avoids all the hoopla of fashion. At the end of the show, in a witty and charming act, the models lined up before us and, like actors, took a dramatic bow, as if just by wearing the clothes they had engaged in a great performance. Maybe that was the message - they say all the world’s a stage, but in Van Noten’s world it’s only worth showing off on the runway - the clothes are the stars and there’s no need for extra props or a narrative.

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