What sounds like an ending holds the promise of a new beginning. This week the Belgian creator Dries van Noten announced that he was retiring from fashion to dedicate himself to his other passions, in the sense that Voltaire gives to the word happiness: “cultivating his garden.” Overflowing with lilies, antique roses and dahlias, theirs, in Lier, Belgium, is a listed former arboretum, dating back to 1820. That’s where Dries Van Noten gained so much inspiration, even converting his perfumes – at the hands of Puig – in a series of olfactory impressions.
From Raving Rose to Santal Greeny, their fragrances were born from an invitation to ten noses. “I dreamed of being able to capture the smells of my garden.” A garden with the colors of her eclecticism, which permeates all of her work. A landscape work where the suits, the coats, masterfully cut would be the trees, and the dresses, the blouses, an extraordinary flower bed in evolution, undulating with the seasons and the light of a fluid gender dream that has always existed.
By giving up his profession, Dries Van Noten invites us to his vantage point: on the horizon, a virtuous ecosystem, from manufacturing to distribution, from cultural roots to material recycling. In Paris, on the Rive Gauche, his store opened in July 2023, and entirely dedicated to perfumes, beauty and accessories, includes a true cabinet of curiosities. In this gold and marble case, the best-seller is none other than Quai Malaquais, a glass and Delft blue porcelain bottle, whose elixir combines silk and chestnut… Like their silhouettes, the refillable and collectible cases are presented in an opposition game. The one we still find in this perfume launched this spring. Mystic Moss (has not yet arrived in Spain). A vegetal mineral clash, in the image of all the opposites that Dries Van Noten likes to associate, pink and pepper, brocades and neons, in fidelity to a story, those classics renewed from season to season by a free and polychrome spirit.
Color has always been its language, tailoring its absolute and unlimited domain of expression, supported by a passion for fabrics. Coming from a family of tailors for three generations, his sense of discipline makes possible all the color contrasts, all the extravagances. Dries Van Noten combines an encyclopedic knowledge of art with knowledge of botany and all the dream places. With, in addition, that inimitable touch, those mixtures that remind us of encounters, sepia and neon, “men and women” (autumn winter 1986), “Plain tales from the Raj” (1988). Already in 1990 he composed a collection on the theme of “Paradisus terristris”.
Ethnic, urban, temperate, tropical, pictorial, unreal, supernatural, nature has always been present. Every season, since the creation of his firm in 1986, it seems to have been the subject of cuts, of new encounters that combine personalities, fabrics, motifs, colors, in a house that looks like a boat-greenhouse: brushed raw canvases, however, The superimpositions of materials, mixtures of animal prints and stripes, as well as the palette itself, bear witness to this polyphony and this sense of composition irreducible to images. There is no infinite number of these houses, where we believe we can make flowers grow having carefully pulled out their roots.
Dries Van Noten is the Ottoman of Antwerp, the Venetian of the north, even his black is always impregnated with light, that light that never stops moving within his clothes, that tattooed and embroidered gold, his painted frock coats, that very particular way that It has to place a spider veil over men’s pants, to suggest in its own way a form of hospitality, of daring splendor in the city. Combining them with white shirts, he de-bourgeois the sequins and feathers. With it, the cleric’s chest converses with opulence, the snake with the line, the carnivorous pink with the ocher orange, the iris with the velvet, the Renaissance with orientalism, each of its silhouettes invites a story, a meeting with a painter, an artist, from Anthony Van Dyck to Bacon, from Bronzino to Jimmy Hendrix. Dries Van Noten has resisted all temptations, the cheap ideology, the opportunism of the formulas of good conscience that some display as advertising posters to maintain their dominance.
His clients love him. Inclusive and eco-responsible before his time, he has always preferred connection to the audience. The surprise to the pseudo-shock. Dries Van Noten has not only created a brand, but an organic development model: a case study that should turn heritage into an asset in terms of social and environmental responsibility. He himself is heir to a world whose values ??he has transmitted without ever parodying them. His files are plantations that must be protected, feeding them, plowing, enriching the soil with creative nutrients, where so many style exercises due to lack of mental substrate are reduced to drying tricks. This is how the largest botanical gardens become balconies with artificial grass.
Last December, in Antwerp, headquarters of DVN, I found in this house-workshop the intact spirit of that trip. In this old brick warehouse converted into a five-story headquarters, where one hundred and twenty people work, activity is intense, but what stands out most is the concentration, the commitment of each person to their job. This is where everything is delivered, from the thread to the buttons, where everything is made, from the patterns to the prototypes, where everything starts, from the novelties to the now partially commercialized archives. I love the way he has dressed the women like dandies and the men like cosmopolitan princes, in silk georgette suits and coats cut from cotton T-shirts. “The people who wear my clothes make them their own, they say. Everything begins every time with words, with images that become silhouettes. But it is the fabric that dictates everything, everything starts from it, it is what dictates the shapes.”
I remember in another game, that of Yves Saint Laurent, in January 2002, that it was so serious, so desperate, because by giving up his job he was giving up life itself. Dries Van Noten has kept in touch with the earth, the sky, that nature that he sees blooming again as a promise. It is his luxury, his treasure, his limitless and intimate horizon at the same time. He seems to hold the heart of the world in his hand. The storms and the whistling of the trees. He knows how to speak with the same intensity, the same joy, about white osmanthus as he does about autumn jams or about his first swim in the Mediterranean.
“The garden is the essence of the world,” he told me, I should have known. But how Dries Van Noten inhabits the infinite with such moderation and simplicity. “In the garden, every moment is captivating. The invisible flowers of December must be discovered one by one to appreciate them; In January the first crocuses appear, you still have to make an effort to find them. They are not like giant rhododendrons. And then, in March, comes the explosion of spring. The great orchestra. When the peonies are in bloom I avoid traveling. Nothing is more precious to me than the first roses under the light, the blue carpet of hyacinths.”
At home everything has the true flavor of the seasons. We bite the fruit, not its substitute. I realize how lucky I am to have felt this beauty from within, through her clothes, her never ostentatious silks, in this way she had to draw her line in prints, to never give up on this odyssey, to go towards the light and share it. “Mixing parsley with a purple vegetable is looking for beauty. “Nature teaches me every day that this beauty is not a question of control but a coincidence between control and abandonment.”
