“That clothes can be more than just business or status symbols, that clothes can be carriers of emotions.”

It is near on impossible to summarise the astonishing 38 years of Dries Van Noten and his unique contribution to fashion, and yet in this eloquent sentence delivered by Dries himself on June 23rd 2024, the day after his final show in Paris, we are in many ways getting to the heart of the matter. The heart of Dries. A designer whose work with its incredible scope and range of inspirations has developed a visual language that means people can say, ‘That’s a bit Dries,’ and you know exactly what they mean, and it’s not only about clothes. It’s about a feeling, a mood, an atmosphere. During the course of 150 collections of menswear and womenswear, Van Noten has delivered 129 fashion shows and has created a world that is inviting and familiar whilst forever keeping people on their toes with new ideas, fresh proposals. It is hard to think of a designer whose use of colour and print is so like that of a painter. It is equally hard to imagine a creative who has relentlessly done things his own way – it was not until 2018 that he took investment in his brand from Puig – and with such an amazing sense of understatement and grace.

In his Paris showroom in the 4th arrondissement, his enthusiasm for the clothes of SS25 – his final collection – that line both sides of the room on racks, is utterly undimmed. Despite the fact that it’s 6pm and a little less than 24 hours ago he delivered 69 new silhouettes in the same venue where he had staged his legendary 50th anniversary show – the infamous one with a dinner that turned into models walking on the dining table. All the while presumably deep in processing the layers of emotions around stepping back from something you have nurtured for the best part of your adult life and which has your name written literally inside of it.

“Clothes that move through life with us, carrying us forward,” read the notes for a show which was opened by Alain Gossuin, who has been in 34 previous Dries shows, including his very first menswear show in Paris in 1991. With a catwalk that stretched to 74 metres festooned with 70,000 silver foils, and a David Bowie soundtrack mixed by Soulwax culminating with Sound and Vision, Van Noten took his final wave to a standing ovation in front of a 1000+ audience, including fellow designers such as Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck and Thom Browne. As the designer exited the runway, a giant disco ball appeared and Donna Summer’s I Feel Love cranked into action.

“That’s from a long time ago, no?” he offers as a greeting, a warm grin opening up his face, referring to a floral print shirt from look 31 of his men’s SS14 collection that I am wearing, which I bought from the Antwerp flagship store and wore to my sister’s wedding. Dries is in his uniform of neat sweater, shirt and slacks, his glasses neatly reside in his crew neckline. He is soon pulling out clothes and revealing the stories around their creation. There are light transparent layers of organza – perhaps an ode to looking out toward a future – some filled with a wadding created from leftover shredded cashmere and wool coats. Semi-precious stones covered in silver and gold yarns are the glorious décor on a jacket sleeve. “This technique takes around four days,” Van Noten says. “We’ve never made our lives easy,” he jokes, a sparkle in his eye.

Colour combinations are classic Dries: trios of pink-olive-burgundy or black-purple-pink. There are pieces created with an ancient Japanese technique, Suminagashi, which he’s never used before and which Van Noten compares to “making a painting.” Graphic leaves and flowers appear on various garments, including coats which are tricky to do with this technique, he says. The process involves floating inks on water and then dipping the garments into the water and out again. As a result, every garment will be slightly different – arguably making them a collectors item.

He touches the clothes with pride. I try on an epic cocoon scuba jacket. He says ‘rubberised’ in his crunchy wonderful Flemish. At points, he seems understandably a little melancholic. Does he have a favourite look or piece? “We don’t choose between our children,” he deadpans. It is the only moment during our hour together in which he plays up to the idea of the ‘fashion designer.’ Later, he will momentarily get quite cross when he is talking about how he has never made clothes based on what the market is demanding and has instead favoured an ‘I do exactly what I want’ creative path, something he doesn’t feel is such a viable possibility or happening so much in fashion at the moment.

At the time of our interview, the post of creative director of Chanel is vacant. To lighten the mood, I venture: “You’re not secretly going to Chanel are you?” He pauses, lets out a chortle, and says: “Now, that would be a surprise for everybody, no?”

There is a scene in the 2017 Dries documentary, directed by Reiner Holzemer which follows the designer and his partner Patrick Vangheluwe, who has worked alongside Van Noten since 1986 and has been the creative director for the brand for many years, when the designer is carrying a basket of flowers back to the house. The camera pans to the basket which is brimming with freshly picked blooms that could easily be the beginnings of one of Van Noten’s seasonal explorations into colour and texture. Later, the designer is captured talking about how a particular floral bouquet’s palette, sitting on a side table in one of the sumptuously eclectic rooms in his and Vangheluwe’s grand home on the outskirts of Lier, just outside of Antwerp, has been chosen specifically to speak to the décor elsewhere in that room. It’s a moment that underscores Van Noten’s aesthetic obsessions, his razor sharp attention to detail, and is also arguably an insight into his being a self-confessed control freak.

Van Noten was appointed a Baron by the King of Belgium the same year Dries was released, in thanks for his enrichment of cultural life in his native country. In 2015, France honoured the designer with the Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the former Minister of Culture for his contributions to their country. In 2009, he was inducted into the Galerie des Eminents by the Flemish Chamber of Commerce, received a gold medal from the Flemish Royal Academy of Belgium and was given the Couture Council Award for Artistry of Fashion from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. None of this pomp and grandeur – as deserved as it is – seems to have made Van Noten anything other than an intensely hardworking fashion designer who has refused to add what he deems unnecessary, pre or cruise collections, instead focusing on four collections a year where they produce everything they show on the runway.

He says he was genuinely surprised at the outpouring from customers and media alike about his announcement in March to step back from the day-to-day duties of the house he began in 1986, after graduating from the fashion course at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium in 1981. Van Noten says he will continue to advise, work on the brand’s stores and beauty line but will not be designing the collections. On this particular shift, he says: “I don’t want them to make a fake Dries collection. It’s a new team and a new identity and they have to be free to make their interpretation of our legacy. But the legacy is not that they have to make modern versions of what I made in the past – no. They have to fill in now what they think Dries in 2025 is going to be.”

Born in Antwerp on May 12th, 1958, Van Noten is the youngest of five children. He grew up in a family deeply connected to clothing. His great grandfather was a tailor. His grandfather was an expert ‘tourneur’ (taking apart second hand garments, then restoring and re-selling them) who eventually opened a men’s clothing store in Antwerp. During the 1950s, his grandfather also had a successful fabric factory whilst selling bespoke and off-the-peg suiting of his own design. Van Noten’s father would continue this family legacy, opening boutiques of his own, including one in the city centre of Antwerp called simply: Van Noten Couture, and selling the likes of Ferragamo and Zegna. Meanwhile, his mother was also involved in the business and ran her own boutique, Cassandre. Van Noten recalls in the book which accompanied his highly acclaimed Dries Van Noten: Inspirations exhibition of 2014 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, that “When we went to church we’d have to be perfectly dressed in identical matching sweaters and little hats.”

The young Dries was taught by Jesuit priests between the ages of six and sixteen. The designer has recalled that his mother’s love of embroidery during his childhood years was something that sparked his own excitement for embroidery when he first travelled to India; Indian textiles are a long established signature of Van Noten’s.

“I definitely wanted it to become a party at the end.”

“I was especially struck by the amount of incredible research going into literally every aspect of his work,” says Kaat Debo, director of the MoMu in Antwerp who worked with Van Noten in 2015 when his exhibition transferred from Paris to his hometown. “The amount of technicality and experimentation that goes into the development of fabrics, prints, or embroidery is stunning. But also aspects like the soundscapes of his shows. It’s never just ‘nice music’. There’s always in-depth storytelling, very layered, full of references, reworking samples with the best musicians. I feel his storytelling hasn’t been appreciated enough,” says Debo.

Throughout his career Van Noten’s ability to be curious, his offer to allow people to see a glimpse of how he sees things through his clothes and shows, has seen him pull at the cultural seams for references that in a lot of designers’ hands could have been banal or clunky. For example, his women’s SS13 show took elements of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love-era grunge and played them off with the paintings of Lucian Freud, all in a very Driesian masculine-feminine fashion, and delivering a wondrous offering of plaid shirts and sheer layers, floral dresses and pyjama jackets. Or the way in which he spliced together and deconstructed David Bowie’s Thin White Duke, Jean Cocteau and military uniforms for his FW11 menswear collection, which resulted in a terrific modern study of the male wardrobe, walking the line between glamour and the essential.

Van Noten’s final statement captured in his show notes was the perfect marriage of touching and intellectual. It read: “This is my 129th show; like the previous ones, it looks ahead. Tonight is many things, but it is not a grand finale. I think about how Marcello Mastroianni once spoke of a paradoxical “Nostalgia del futuro,” beyond the lost paradises imagined by Proust, and how we continue to pursue our dreams knowing that, at some point, we can look back on them with love. I love my job, I love doing fashion shows, and sharing fashion with people. Creating is about leaving something that lives on. My sense of this moment is how it is not only mine, but ours, always.”

Simon Chilvers: What do you think you have wanted to say with fashion during all these years?
Dries Van Noten: To say honestly, I always followed my heart and my soul. I never really thought about a tactic or a plan. So everything came in a very spontaneous and natural way, and I think that’s maybe also the strength of it. It’s not really keeping in mind a marketing plan behind it or clothes which are made on request of the market. I think it’s very interesting to see how the market and the stores are selling clothes. But afterwards, I do exactly what I want. We make clothes for people, OK it’s a cliché thing to say, but you can make clothes that you think people are going to want or you can make clothes that people don’t know that they’re going to want. That for me, the last one, is really important. That I really can surprise people. For me, that really gave me the energy to continue for such a time.

“I always followed my heart and my soul”

SC: Surprising people has really driven you.
DVN: Absolutely. The first person who has to be surprised is myself because otherwise you get bored. Fashion, being a fashion designer, is far too intense to just repeat whatever you have to do, no? I think it has to stay fun, it has to stay a challenge, with the good things and the bad things of a challenge. We could have made our lives much easier, worked less hard if we had made it easy but that was not really how we wanted to do it.

SC: Growing up, your family was very involved with the business of fashion. What was that like? Do you have a particular early clothing related memory that perhaps shaped your path to becoming a designer?
DVN: I think in every childhood you get an education from your parents and schools. When you’re fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old and then even older, of course you start to rebel against this. As a child my father really wanted that my brother and I were gardening summer and winter, in cold rain, snow, wherever, we had to garden nearly one day every weekend, which I hated, absolutely hated! In the early 1970s, I saw David Bowie perform The Jean Genie [1972] on television and that for me was far more fascinating than working in the garden [laughs]. But then of course at a certain age, things come back. My parents taught me a lot. I discovered fashion in that way. I saw my first fashion shows, OK it was commercial brands, but I got the vibe of the fashion show. So, yes, it’s my luggage that I carry with me. In terms of tailoring, it is also inherent to my background as the grandson of a tailor and I still see the power of the suit. The opening look [SS25] with this long narrow coat with the big lapel and the very low closure, I want to play with proportions and really try to move things forward.

SC: When you made the leap to being a fashion designer and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp [Dries graduated in 1981] – what was that like? Can you talk a little about your graduate collection? There was some snakeskin in that collection and also in last night’s SS25 show?
DVN: There was a snakeskin coat absolutely [in the graduate collection] that I still remember cutting out at night – all the pieces! When I had been at fashion school for a few months, I discovered that I would much rather create fashion than only buy and sell fashion. I went to fashion school to follow my father and mother in the stores as it was a very successful business but then I went to my father and said, “I’m really sorry but I would prefer to become a fashion designer and being only in the stores is not interesting for me.” My father said to me, “Fine, but not with my money!” I had to work to pay for my studies so I was designing commercial collections during fashion school and I started to see how the industry was working, that was one of the elements I could bring to the group of students that we were [the Antwerp Six] – everyone had different interests. Walter [Van Beirendonck] and Dirk [Van Saene] went to London and discovered punk, Vivienne Westwood and New Romantic. Ann [Demeulemeester] had an incredible artistic vision. She was fascinated by Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith. Her husband Patrick Robyn was making the most incredible pictures. Everybody brought things to the mix and we shared those things. It’s not that we kept those things for ourselves. There was a good competition between us, but everybody shared their knowledge and that is what made the six of Antwerp, the six of Antwerp.

SC: I love the idea of the six of you driving to London in a van in 1986 for the British Designer Show. There’s the now infamous story that you had flyers that said ‘COME SEE THE SIX BELGIAN DESIGNERS’.
DVN: People think it was all planned and organised but no. We had the least expensive space and the people from the British Designer Show forgot to mention us. We were on the floor with lingerie and wedding dresses, and we were behind the wedding dresses! This was why we had to give out the flyers, which is a story everybody knows but it was the reality. It was all quite naive, and just like ‘Let’s try!’ We couldn’t really imagine that we would manage to make anything happen. At a certain moment, we were hesitating as to whether we had to change our names because our names were impossible to say! We were very jealous of Martin Margiela [who was not part of the Antwerp Six] and Marina Yee [who was] because they were easy to pronounce [laughs].

SC: Thinking about your incredible body of work. Two things seem like anchors within it – firstly, your partner in work and life Patrick Vangheluwe, who has worked with you since 1986, and secondly, Antwerp, a place you have described as “part of our soul.” Can you talk about the influences of both of those on the brand and how you design as a result of them?
DVN: I think Patrick really pushed me forward. I am a perfectionist. Patrick is also a perfectionist. But our concept of perfection is not always the same, which is not always easy in a relationship, it can be… [mimes a clash] but on the other hand, I think that we appreciate each other so strongly that we can be honest with each other and say, “I’m sorry but I don’t think its enough,” or, “It’s not good enough, we still have to look further.“ So in that way, it’s a constant trying to put the bar higher and higher and higher, and do more, and better and better! And Antwerp, I always said was giving me a healthy distance from the whole fashion circus. It was much easier to see from a little distance what we had to do, what was important, what was not important. I think when you’re in the middle of it, it’s more difficult to do that.

SC: You said in 2017, in the Dries film, that “Fashion is an empty word. I think we have to invent a new word for fashion.” Do you still think this and did you ever come up with a better word?
DVN: I haven’t found a new word, no. And I still think that fashion is a very empty word. Because ‘fashion’ really indicates that there is a beginning – that something gets fashionable – and then it ends. I think that’s not true. Really good clothes can live for a very long time. The concept that fashion is something that is passing by really fast I think is sad. If that is fashion, it was never my goal to make fashion because I never tried to make clothes that would be considered nice or interesting for one season.

SC: Was it quite weird making that film?
DVN: It was very weird [smiles, pauses]. But on the other hand, I also knew Reiner Holzemer [director, writer, producer] and Aminata Sambe [co-producer] who were making the film – and Aminata has produced so many fashion shows, and she helped us also with the exhibition [Dries Van Noten: Inspirations, 2014, at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, then 2015 at MoMu, Antwerp]. With the exhibition, I loved putting it together but also I was letting people look in my brain, how I work with inspirations and make the connections, click, click, click. But then I thought, it could also be interesting to look in my soul, but also of course that is a very personal thing to do, and to make it an interesting movie I had to let out the whole control freak which I am, and I had to give it into the hands of Reiner. Knowing the movies that he had made already I thought that he was the right person, especially with Aminata, they are going to do it with the right respect. OK, there are a few scenes that I am not too happy about. I said, “Can’t you cut that out.” It’s a few stupid things though.

SC: What are your recollections of your very first men’s show in Paris in 1991 for the SS92 collection? And thinking about that with what you did last night for SS25, the two, let’s say bookends, of your fashion shows? The first men’s show also had women in it.
DVN: We were so naive then. The fun! It was very ‘Lets do it, let’s make it happen’. It was an extremely low budget. Luckily, we had Alain Gossuin [model, who opened SS25 and SS92] who was a good friend – he had done some photoshoots with us. He was one of the top models at the time and he asked friends, other important models, to model for us for nearly no budget, which luckily everybody did [smiles]. We also had some street casting mixed with professional models and it was kind of crazy, we took the risk, and the reaction was great.

SC: It’s so lively! The models are swaggering on the runway!
DVN: Yes. People had to be lively and move because the catwalk was only twelve metres long – [the SS25 runway was 74 metres long by contrast] – I think, so you couldn’t do a lot [laughs]. You just about start and then have to go back already! But it was fun. There was no strategy.

SC: How was it thinking about what you were going to do last night? I know the fashion show has always been a big part of your process.
DVN: This show of yesterday was a completely different way of working than a normal show because I knew it was going to be my last one, so first we wanted to figure out how I wanted to say goodbye and to finalise my career. So I said, “I don’t want to announce that I step down after the show.“ I liked the idea that people would know that it was my last show rather than doing the show and then being like, “Surprise, that was my last one.” That was one thing, then the reactions after my announcement were much, much bigger and much more intense than I had imagined.

SC: Really?
DVN: Oh yes. It was quite intense. That week, I got so many letters and mails and messages and social media and it was just like… [makes an overwhelmed face].

SC: Did it make you question your decision?
DVN: No. That was quite clear to me, that it was the right decision. And also there was no way back anyway, like “Oh sorry we were just kidding!” Then of course you start to think, and before the announcement, we thought we would do a normal show during men’s in Paris for about 400 people, but then we started to think about the Olympic Games, and we didn’t know how many people were going to be in Paris, because at that time there were conversations around whether there would even be a fashion week. Then after the announcement, our commercial team were inundated with requests of people who wanted to come and see the show. So then we said, “OK, we have to make it slightly bigger!” It couldn’t be a best of. Definitely not. Not looking back through my career. I really wanted to prove that I could still step forward and that I could enjoy this last chance to make things I had been dreaming of making, so I thank my team for helping me because it was tough. I also didn’t want it to be a sad situation. I knew we had quite an intimate soundtrack but I definitely wanted it to become a party at the end, which it did [laughs].

“The concept that fashion is something that is passing by really fast I think is sad.”

SC: How did you feel before it started, and then afterwards?
DVN: Of course very nervous. It’s very intense because it started with interviews and you’re emotional. The days before had been quite emotional because there are a lot of people and you start to get messages, but the moment itself was always going to be so intense. But we said we are going to have a cocktail [before the show] and we have to mingle, which Patrick and I did, which is normally not really what we like to do but it was a nice moment.

SC: How was it to see everyone in their Dries outfits?
DVN: It was really beautiful. Absolutely. So many people telling stories about how the clothes had lived and how they had lived in them and worn them to celebrations. That was really special.

SC: There is something particular to your clothes and what you have brought to fashion that I think translates for a lot of people as clothes that are emotional. When you talk to customers and people who wear the clothes, do they talk about the clothes being emotional?
DVN: Nearly every time. Emotions come up constantly, and that for me is exceptional. That is really something I can cherish, that we achieved that. That clothes can be more than just business or status symbols, that clothes can be carriers of emotions.

SC: What is your advice to the people who are going to carry on doing your work now?
DVN: There is not one thing! There is a briefing of like a few days that I have to give [laughs]. And also they can do with it what they want. I will still be involved with the company, with the perfumes and I will still advise the fashion teams who work on the collections. It’s advice they can follow, or they can say, “Interesting to know but we believe in what we’re doing.” It’s no longer my role to say, “You can’t do that.” I don’t want them to make a fake Dries collection. It’s a new team and a new identity and they have to be free to make their interpretation of our legacy. But the legacy is not that they have to make modern versions of what I made in the past – no. They have to fill in now what they think Dries in 2025 is going to be.

SC: What do you think has most changed most in menswear since you started?
DVN: It’s quite an evolution. In the 1980s men’s fashion was quite often women’s fashion made in men’s sizes. Fashion in that moment also had a really very gay connotation. Whereas in the 1990s, during minimalism, straight guys really tried to look as less fashion as possible. Then at a certain moment, you got this whole interesting thing when men started to be very interested in fashion again, and I think at the moment men’s fashion is more interesting than women’s fashion. Women’s fashion is so much about accessories. A lot of womenswear is jeans, a white t-shirt and an expensive handbag, which is a bit of a pity. Fashion deserves to be more than that.

SC: “I make clothes people can wear; I don’t make art.” Can you talk about how you have built such a strong visual language that has resulted very much in clothes that people have wanted to wear but that are often also actually quite arty?
DVN: I think you have to find the right balance, and also the clothes are really pieces on their own. Sometimes you have a more extreme top part of something but then you also have quite basic pieces so you can combine them in the way that you want. I really encourage people to buy one piece and to wear it the way that you like, and maybe you combine it with some vintage pieces, something from Uniqlo. I think that is what fashion is, showing your personality. And not buying a total look and then just wearing it the way we showed it on the fashion show. The fashion show is just the way to show possibilities and then it’s up to the stores and the buyers to make their selection, and then finally up to the customer.

SC: When do you think you realised that people could say, “Oh, that’s very Dries” and other people understood what that meant?
DVN: In the 1990s we were doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing. It was the time of Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, so minimalism. And we were showing the brightest colours, Indian embroideries and crazy prints. At the end of the 90s it was a difficult time, a lot of the big groups were buying up designers like Jil Sander and Alexander McQueen, and then my then-business partner Christine Mathys passed away. Tom Ford started at Gucci so accessories became the leading business not clothes anymore. It was an ugly time. We had a few offers. We thought we had to become more strict about the collections, so you can see when you look at the shows that there was a bit of a wobble, maybe two or three fashion shows, and then we broke up with a few people in the team who were questioning what we should be. And from then on it started to become clear what we stood for and we really started to build on certain things, so prints, beautiful colours, embroideries, tailoring, the mixing of these things and the contrasts between them.

SC: You once said that the best material combinations are born by coincidence. But I’d argue it was… confidence? Can you talk about your unexpected approach to the marriage of these incredible prints and patterns?
DVN: When there is too much thinking around it, it’s not good. You kill it. It has to be quite spontaneous. How you put things together has to be about instinct. My team might ask me why I put this thing on top of this and I would love to be able to explain why. There is a saying that Etienne Rosso [who has produced all of Dries’ fashion shows since 1991] and I say, “When you see the trick, you lose the magic.” When it is becoming a system, the idea is dead. So every season you have to rethink a little bit to see again if you can surprise people and surprise yourself. It’s instinct.

SC: The Dries palette is always a talking point. Have you always loved colour?
DVN: I’ve always loved colour. I really wanted to push boundaries, I wanted to push my own taste and also that the team pushed my taste.

SC: When do you know that a colour combination is right or working? Your approach seems to me to be similar to how a painter might work.
DVN: I think you can say it is nearly [working] like a painter. I use my fabrics and I have my fabric table with all the colours, then I put those things together and I start to play with it. But sometimes when you see things as real clothes, in fact, it doesn’t work. It is of course not just the colours but the way the fabric drapes. The way the colour is translucent or not translucent.

SC: How does art influence or inspire you?
DVN: It inspires me but it is not like, “OK, I like this painting let’s do those colours.” The women’s [Francis] Bacon collection [women’s FW09] is one of the most famous collections that started from an artist, but not really from the art. I stayed for a few hours at the exhibition in the Tate in London when we started to prepare this collection, but it was more my emotions in fact. I remember when I came out, I was really sick of the beauty and the horror at the same time. The most beautiful and most ugly things at the same time combined in a painting was so powerful. There were like 160 or 180 paintings – it was like being bombarded. It was super intense. Then I really wanted to work around what I felt and see if I could also give people an emotional response like that, so I started to use ugly colours. A dirty purplish grey in the most matte wool gaberdine you could find combined with a washed out pale orange crepe de chine with the salmon pink trench coat on top, which Suzy Menkes [fashion critic] described – she was not really a fan of the collection on first sight – she said, “And the coat is made in the colour we now call dead salmon.” Ouch. A few months later she wrote me a letter to say “You were right, I was wrong.”

SC: I didn’t realise until recently you had done a David Hockney collection. What do you love about him?
DVN: I love David Hockney but that was not my strongest collection. It’s far too literal. This was the period I was talking about. We were trying to work some things out but the answer wasn’t to give everybody a striped knitted tie and then you have a great collection! Even when I did collections that were not so great, you can learn more from them than the ones that are great.

SC: You based the men’s SS09 collection on the Elizabeth Peyton paintings Democrats Are More Beautiful (after John Horowitz) of 2001. What drew you to her work and that particular picture?
DVN: I discovered her paintings and loved their strangeness. I started to think about putting extra subtle layers into the collections, sometimes in a perverse way. You can give a hint of something perverse or kinky sometimes. A jacket that was very shiny, too clean pants, a white polo, or shorts that were maybe just a little bit too tight or too short. It’s fantastic that you can play with these things and that you start to learn even more about what emotions you can evoke by just making a pair of shorts 3cm shorter.

“The reactions after my announcement were much, much bigger and much more intense than I had imagined.”

SC: The exhibition Dries Van Noten: Inspirations [2014] was one of the most interesting shows on fashion that I’ve ever seen, particularly the way you brought together the various aspects of culture alongside the collections. The clothes often do have a kind of cultural component or feeling to them. As a designer, how are you thinking about culture and what are you drawn to?
DVN: Again, there isn’t a system in it. That would make it again, boring. It’s not like “OK, let’s look at a film and what exhibitions did we see and what did we do, and boom boom boom we have a collection!” That would have made my life so easy. [smiles]

SC: But you’re very about characters and storytelling? You always start with characters.
DVN: Every time I start with characters but I want to find a different angle. To surprise myself, to keep myself motivated, to push myself. If I was getting a little bit lazy, Patrick would push me to go a step further. He would say “No, it’s not good enough, it’s too direct, it’s too literal, move on, develop this, develop that, question this, question that.” In that way, we constantly pushed each other forward.

SC: Could you ever imagine yourself costuming a film?
DVN: I don’t know. It would be very interesting. But I’m a control freak so I think I would have to understand so well everything, and how it works. I did quite a few dance productions, and there I wanted to be at every rehearsal. I wanted to understand how the light works, how the light reflects on something. If the colour and the movement of the garments are the right thing. I think a film would be very complex for me.

SC: How was it to work with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker of Rosas who you have repeatedly collaborated with on her work and yours? How important are those kinds of collaborations?
DVN: She’s a complex person of course and tough on herself and on everybody. I really love to work with her because I learn a lot. She does a lot of movements on the floor and she forced me to think about how the fabrics are draping. When a dancer gets up again, you can’t have something that might stick to their body, you have to have something with a certain weight, and then they fall down again and stand back up again, it can’t wrinkle. It’s quite technical. For me, that was interesting. For Rain [a Rosas dance piece of 2001] we did all those grey beige things, there was a very small colour evolution in it where I really insisted that the dancers had time to quickly go off stage to change, just one layer so there is a subtle shift but that tells a story. It was nice in that moment that Anne Teresa, who is so obsessed by the movement, that she could see that clothes could make a movement stronger or weaker or that you can feel it in such a different way, and also that colour can have such an impact.

SC: How important is movement in your clothes?
DVN: The structure of a garment can be very fluid or can be the opposite. It can be very clean, can be stiff, can be round, it can fold in a certain way. That I think also makes an outfit. I like to play with that, again it’s the way you feel a garment, or the way you see a garment move around the body. In the film [for FW21] we made with Casper Sejersen during the Covid period, with all the dancers – Anne Teresa was also in that – you had the contest constantly between all the very stiff materials so all the duchesse with padding inside, and then besides that, you had all the fluid things that were draping and floating around, and then you had all the feathers for the lightness.

SC: Where do you think fashion sits in terms of culture?
DVN: I think for everybody it’s different. For me, fashion is nearly at the level of art but it is not art. It is still an applied art. But of course, when you then see some things that are so mind-blowing, it can also become art.

SC: Is David Bowie the best dressed man of all time?
DVN: Maybe not the best dressed man but the most inspiring one definitely, yes. For me, you don’t have to be the best dressed because I always like wacky or tacky elements in things, which don’t fit so well with the idea of a best dressed man. Maybe also because the best dressed man idea is a little bit boring.

SC: What is the strangest way a collection ever began?
DVN: It’s difficult to say. But one example, I had a book about Marchesa [Luisa] Casati and then working on the collection [women’s FW16] it was far too one-dimensional, we had leopard, we had snake. But I wanted to dive deep. I started to research Gabriele D’Annunzio also, and they had a love-hate relationship – that they tried really to destroy each other out of love. That for me was much more interesting as a feeling – that evil. That real bad, bad person evilness! How far can you push it! That was really fascinating. Not the most happy starting point for a collection [laughs].

SC: We couldn’t have this conversation today without asking you about flowers and gardens. They have such an omnipresence in the collections but also we know that you love your garden at home. Ultimately, what is about them that is such a draw?
DVN: Gardens is something that saved me and maybe also our relationship at a certain moment. Patrick and I were working so hard and we were living in the city, sometimes after dinner one of us would go to the office to do something and we thought perhaps [if we carried on like this] our relationship might not last forever. Then buying the house [Ringenhof is set in a 55-acre park on the outskirts of Lier, outside of Antwerp] and the garden was quite healing. Then also we had another thing to do aside from building up our company and trying to make that successful. Then we had the dog. For me, our dog Scott is the best. Normally, I don’t take him everyday to the office but in the last weeks he was everyday besides me, and I needed him to cuddle.

SC: Are you still making jam?
DVN: I am still making jam, not as often as before.

SC: One of my favourite shows is the one you based on Rudolf Nureyev [men’s SS15]. It was one of the sexiest and most romantic shows I’ve seen.
DVN: The music was by Thierry De Mey [Belgian composer and filmmaker] which was also a composition he made for Anne Teresa [smiles]. At the time I was doing a lot of dance productions together with Anne Teresa. I loved the idea that with the costumes of Nureyev, that [in pictures] you could often only see the top half, so you had to tell the whole historical part in the top half. I reduced it even more, so we had the strange shaped part on the shoulder that was sometimes holding the naked torso or just the coats which were floating. That was a kind of a study in draping and softer, more floating things on the body, and [it was] the first time I had really explored that in menswear. We also had some sketches of naked dancers that Richard Haines made which we had on suits. There was something clearly erotic in it.

SC: We also have to talk about the men’s Paris opera show of FW16 of which the Vogue Runway review begins with the somewhat apt word: wowwweee. The audience was on stage! The main curtains opened to reveal the photographers! Then another to reveal the models!
DVN: We had asked for about thirteen years for permission to do the show on the stage there [Opéra Garnier, Paris]. It was purely coincidence that we got it – at the same time, there was an opera production by my dear friend Robert Carsen [Capriccio]. I have always been fascinated by a theatre stage and the idea of the audience at the theatre. We had started designing that collection and we had a collaboration with Wes Wilson who was a graphic artist who made all these psychedelic prints. We brought in even more burgundy velvet and gold bullion! The velvets together with the peacock embroideries, and also that kind of psychedelia – and Frank Zappa, who is one of my all- time heroes. It all made sense.

SC: What makes you laugh?
DRIES: Quite a lot of things. It can be quite stupid things.

SC: In a recent interview in the New York Times, you spoke about a project involving young people and craft. Can you tell us any more about that?
DVN: My team is really young and I think that is what I going to miss most. I said to Patrick, “Forget it, I am not going to only talk now with our friends who are 60 and 70 years old.” I refuse! I want to have young people around me who teach me, that is really important. But I can’t say any more about the project itself.

SC: Is there anything you would change about this fashion journey that you’ve been on?
DVN: I wouldn’t change [anything] because good things and bad things, you learn from it. I think I can be a happy man looking back to my path, to my career.

SC: What do you want people to remember about the work?
DVN: I think it’s going to be different for everyone. For some people, it’s going to be the soundtrack, for some the fashion shows, for some what I did for menswear. The last months, I’ve been really surprised how much people have talked about the exhibition, that is really something a lot of people have a very clear memory of. What I did and how I changed a little bit the idea of a fashion exhibition. So, I think it’s a lot of things.

SC: What’s the one question that people never ask you that you wish they did?
DVN: Over the past few days I’ve been asked so many questions that maybe for the moment I would prefer not to be asked any more [laughs].

Interview originally published inside HERO 31.