THE CONSTANT GARDENER
Belgian designer DRIES VAN NOTEN meets up with VIVIENNE TANG in Antwerp to talk shop, gardening and his concerns for the future of fashion
IT’S A SUNNY, cold Monday morning in Antwerp. Despite the clear, bright sky, the icy wind has already found its way into my trench coat. I pull my collar up to the chin as I try to orientate myself in the deserted industrial area near the Schelde, the long river that flows past the city. I look up at the large brick building in front of me, then glance at the piece of paper with the address. Again, I examine the large brick doors, but there’s no signage, nothing. And for a minute I think I’m lost, dropped off in the middle of nowhere. There’s not a single pedestrian in sight.
“Godefriduskaai 36, this must be it,” I mutter to myself. And after much debating whether or not I should dial the number in my phone, I discover a tiny plate above the bell that says “Dries Van Noten,” completely blending into the colour of the wall. I ring the bell, enter, and soon find myself in the office entrance of the designer’s headquarters.
The receptionist asks me to wait in the lobby, as she informs the designer of my arrival. I look around and discover stacked boxes of men’s shoes through a window, as well as fresh Lamingtons resting on the counter. I wonder if I should try one, but my thoughts are interrupted by a bunch of fashionable young things who enter the room and pick up some of the yummy delights on their way out. Just before I give in to temptation, I’m guided to the designer’s sparsely furnished office on the fourth floor, from where he oversees everything that happens in the building – pattern cutting, design, knitwear, embroidery, fabrics, finances and production.
Meeting Dries Van Noten doesn’t come close to any of my expectations. Despite his renown in the world of fashion, there’s no showmanship or any of the other superstar-like designer traits that are too often marketed to represent a brand or an entire fashion house. Instead, Van Noten is extremely “normal” – not in a conventional or average way, but simply in a low-key, Belgian kind of way. I’m surprised we’re not doing the interview over a beer and fries down at the cafe, or perhaps over afternoon tea in the designer’s garden – a more sophisticated and elegant choice of venue.
For Van Noten it’s all about elegance and perfection (even if he doesn’t admit it). But he explains that the results of his creations often begin with something totally contradictory. “I prefer women who are not perfectly beautiful. I’m far more interested in ugly things, things that I really don’t like. I prefer women with a big nose, strange ears or eyes. I need to be intrigued by things. I like to scratch the surface and see why I don’t like it and what I can change there.”
He lets on that he’s a bit self-conscious about his looks and his age – he tells me that he no longer designs for himself because he’s over 50 years old – but his collections do cover three generations. And if one thinks this might make him vain, he definitely has his ego in check. He doesn’t resort to name-dropping or dress in a way that blatantly screams for attention.
This particular morning he wears a dark blue sweater over a striped shirt with matching slacks, complemented by a polka-dot scarf around his neck. His understated, elegance has become something of a trademark, not only for him as a person, but also for his label: reserved but not shy; eccentric, but not flamboyant or garish.
“I always try to make nice garments, things that people really want to wear,” says Van Noten in a thick Belgian accent, heavily rolling the Rs. “I hate garments that overwhelm the person.”
The designer has never made clothes to please the fashion critics. In fact, he resists talking to journalists. Yet he’s aware of what is being written or blogged about his latest collections, but, he says, the customer always comes first. He does not let the reviews dictate the creative process – a wise recipe in this day and age, when everything you see is so brand- and product-heavy, and consumers are longing for fashion with a deeper meaning.
Indeed, Van Noten has always been known for doing his own thing. When brands were spending a fortune on expensive ad campaigns, he refused to advertise in magazines. And when fashion houses started branching out into bags and jewellery to make a quick buck, he stuck with what he knows best: garments. His label grew slowly but steadily, and while all the nouveau riche started storming the stores of big accessory houses, the fashion connoisseurs all started to shop at Dries’.
“In the beginning we had no budget for publicity,” he recalls. “Then in the early ’90s, after seven years, we decided to do a fashion show, which for me was more important as a way of communication than publicity. We said, ‘We don’t need it. What’s the point?’ In our case it would have harmed the business more than help us, because people started to buy the collection for the clothes, and not so much for the name behind it.”
Born in 1958 into a family of tailors (his grandfather was a tailor and his father owned a menswear shop), Van Noten never ended up taking over his father’s business, stating that “designing is much more fun.” He was one of the legendary Antwerp Six (along with Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee) that helped stir up a bit of a fashion revolution with their minimalist designs in the mid ’80s. But Van Noten’s career really took off when his first menswear collection debuted in London in 1986. Women’s ready-to-wear soon followed, and by 1991 he was showing at Paris Fashion Week.
When asked about the influence of Antwerp fashion and his competitors, he laughs confidently, knowing that he made the right decision not to move to Paris. “There’s not much competition here in Antwerp,” he reveals. “So you start to think about clothes in a different way. The people know you, and they like you for who you are. A lot of the fashion designers I know quite well. We’re good friends. I studied together with Ann Demeulemeester and Walter. So it’s more like colleagues than competition.”
Van Noten shuns the limelight. He lives in a seven-acre house 15km into the countryside, where he enjoys a vast garden and entertains guests in the stylishly decorated home together with his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, and their Airedale terrier, Harry. And, when he needs to visit, Paris is just a train-ride away. “I’m not afraid of the spotlight, but it’s not really something that I need,” he explains. “I love to live here in Antwerp. It’s really quiet. It’s very laid back and relaxed.
“I love gardening. My father was also a gardener. I just returned from a whole week I spent at home, and every day I was in the garden early in the morning until late in the evening. So this morning I had to choose fabric, but my hands are too rough. It always takes a bit of time transitioning from gardening to fashion design.”
His garden is not only a place of rejuvenation, but also his source of inspiration – numerous collections and patterns have been traced back to roses and other flowers, creating a style staple for the brand.
Also, a lot of research goes into his fabrics – tweeds from a small Scottish mill, velvet that has been burnt and printed, silver embroidery from India – fabrics that have earned him a loyal following, including the glitterati, who enjoy wearing his creations to red-carpet events.
But it’s customers out of the spotlight that he seems to appreciate best. “It’s nice when you see somebody in the street that you don’t know at all, a young guy or girl that had to work in a cafe on the weekend to earn money to buy your clothes. Sometimes this is a bigger compliment than a star, who just has to ring the press office and say, ‘Send me this!’ ”
It doesn’t mean that he dislikes celebrities wearing his clothes. Perhaps he’s just too understated to admit it or simply too busy to pursue brand endorsement on a grander scale. After many questions, he confides that he did a few outfits for Mick Jagger in the past and that he designed something exclusive for Maggie Gyllenhaal for the last Oscars. “But Maggie also became kind of a friend, because she often wears our clothes,” he adds quickly. “I also designed her wedding dress, which was very private. Nobody saw it, which is what I like. We have a lot of stars that wear our clothes, but they just buy them in the stores.”
Van Noten doesn’t care to turn his self-funded brand into a lifestyle empire with diffusion lines and safe eyewear and fragrance products. He’s perfectly content with four collections and not having to spend much time on accessories. “I don’t want to do pre-collections,” he says. “Many people divide their energy into different collections. I really want to put all my creativity into one big thing.” He rolls his eyes, loathing the idea of all the unnecessary work, mixed with a feeling of repulsion toward the concept of fragmenting your passion and devotion into numerous lines.
“I think the dream of every fashion designer is to take one season off. It’s the rat race of one show finishing and the new one starting again. I think every designer dreams of having six months off. But you know you can’t escape.”
But Van Noten is not afraid to praise or admire the ones that have walked the path before him and influenced huge consumers with their unique look, even if he never plans to go down that route. “There are many designers that inspire me,” he says. “That goes from Paul Poiret to Saint Laurent to Japanese designers that were discovered in the ’80s…even designers like Ralph Lauren, who has created an image for a whole nation. When you think about America now, you see white-painted houses. In fact you see the ads of Ralph Lauren.“
But despite his increasing success, he doesn’t follow fashion blindly. He laughs at the idea of collaborating with H&M, but he doesn’t oppose doing projects with interesting artists, such as the late Malcolm McLaren, who he collaborated with on his last soundtrack for the autumn/winter 2010 show, a juxtaposition of punk vocals and the Hitchcockian music from Vertigo. “This was a really fantastic collaboration,” he says about working with the former Sex Pistols manager. “But when my PR is saying that it would be good for my brand awareness to collaborate with a sports manufacturer, then I’ll say, ‘Sorry, but I don’t know these people, so forget it.’ I have other things to do. I prefer to be in my garden.”
He also refers to the new kind of luxury, and how our values have changed over the past couple of years. “Luxury has changed a lot. In the past it was eating in a three-star restaurant. Now it’s eating home-grown vegetables in a garden (such as his own) or somewhere on a mountain, or going to a small cottage where you find handmade cheese, and just having a taste of that in open air, that’s luxury now. In fashion it’s a bit the same. In the past, haute couture was luxury. And now finding a sweater in hand-spun cashmere somewhere in the hills of Nepal is far more exciting and luxurious.”
Furthermore, the fast-paced movement – in a world of digital access, instant demand and supply – isn’t something that comes easily to him. “If I want to know something about an African tribe, I can just push a button,” he says. “On the other hand, there’s also a bit of a fatigue, as people can see everything about every garment from the front, side, back, every shoe detail and embroidery. So by the time the clothes are in the store, everyone’s already seen it, and the next show is already there.”
When Van Noten voices his opinion about the debate among the fashion cognoscenti whether bloggers should be treated as fashion editors and seated in the first row next to the elite during fashion week, he’s blunt.
“I think it’s a little bit scary that a person of 14 years old, like Tavi [Gevinson] for instance, has more importance than the most praised fashion critics. It says a lot about fashion. People who need such a spontaneous reaction from a 14-year-old, who doesn’t have the education and the background to understand, might also show the emptiness of fashion.” But he says he understands that it’s all part of an evolution one has to live with, even peripherally.
I then ask how he sees consumerism, which is also, to a large extent, driving the fashion industry, an industry with designers, who are no longer creating for their own labels, such as his colleague Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang or Jil Sander.
“I don’t know where it’s heading, and it scares me,” he tells me openly. “Nowadays when you see fashion shows, there’s something missing – the personal touch. You feel that many things are done by a team, and everything becomes a product. A lot of the emotion is gone. And I think it’s such a pity for fashion. All the skills are disappearing. Maybe I’m just a romantic.”
![whereisthecoool:
Movies from an Alternate Universe
“Awhile back a friend of mine forwarded me a site where an artist had made posters of films that, title wise, we were familiar with, but there was a slight difference; they were remade as if they belonged to a different era or a different genre, the name of the movie was there, but the actors were different, the style was different, and I loved the concept. So I went forward with this theme; what if movies we were all familiar with were made a different slice of time? Who would be in it? Who would direct it? So here we are…” - illustrator Peter Stults
More posters here. [via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxwsisoWkX1qzleu4o1_500.png)
![Another Driesy article XO
gaws:
THE CONSTANT GARDENERBelgian designer DRIES VAN NOTEN meets up with VIVIENNE TANG in Antwerp to talk shop, gardening and his concerns for the future of fashion
IT’S A SUNNY, cold Monday morning in Antwerp. Despite the clear, bright sky, the icy wind has already found its way into my trench coat. I pull my collar up to the chin as I try to orientate myself in the deserted industrial area near the Schelde, the long river that flows past the city. I look up at the large brick building in front of me, then glance at the piece of paper with the address. Again, I examine the large brick doors, but there’s no signage, nothing. And for a minute I think I’m lost, dropped off in the middle of nowhere. There’s not a single pedestrian in sight.
“Godefriduskaai 36, this must be it,” I mutter to myself. And after much debating whether or not I should dial the number in my phone, I discover a tiny plate above the bell that says “Dries Van Noten,” completely blending into the colour of the wall. I ring the bell, enter, and soon find myself in the office entrance of the designer’s headquarters.
The receptionist asks me to wait in the lobby, as she informs the designer of my arrival. I look around and discover stacked boxes of men’s shoes through a window, as well as fresh Lamingtons resting on the counter. I wonder if I should try one, but my thoughts are interrupted by a bunch of fashionable young things who enter the room and pick up some of the yummy delights on their way out. Just before I give in to temptation, I’m guided to the designer’s sparsely furnished office on the fourth floor, from where he oversees everything that happens in the building – pattern cutting, design, knitwear, embroidery, fabrics, finances and production.
Meeting Dries Van Noten doesn’t come close to any of my expectations. Despite his renown in the world of fashion, there’s no showmanship or any of the other superstar-like designer traits that are too often marketed to represent a brand or an entire fashion house. Instead, Van Noten is extremely “normal” – not in a conventional or average way, but simply in a low-key, Belgian kind of way. I’m surprised we’re not doing the interview over a beer and fries down at the cafe, or perhaps over afternoon tea in the designer’s garden – a more sophisticated and elegant choice of venue.
For Van Noten it’s all about elegance and perfection (even if he doesn’t admit it). But he explains that the results of his creations often begin with something totally contradictory. “I prefer women who are not perfectly beautiful. I’m far more interested in ugly things, things that I really don’t like. I prefer women with a big nose, strange ears or eyes. I need to be intrigued by things. I like to scratch the surface and see why I don’t like it and what I can change there.”
He lets on that he’s a bit self-conscious about his looks and his age – he tells me that he no longer designs for himself because he’s over 50 years old – but his collections do cover three generations. And if one thinks this might make him vain, he definitely has his ego in check. He doesn’t resort to name-dropping or dress in a way that blatantly screams for attention.
This particular morning he wears a dark blue sweater over a striped shirt with matching slacks, complemented by a polka-dot scarf around his neck. His understated, elegance has become something of a trademark, not only for him as a person, but also for his label: reserved but not shy; eccentric, but not flamboyant or garish.
“I always try to make nice garments, things that people really want to wear,” says Van Noten in a thick Belgian accent, heavily rolling the Rs. “I hate garments that overwhelm the person.”
The designer has never made clothes to please the fashion critics. In fact, he resists talking to journalists. Yet he’s aware of what is being written or blogged about his latest collections, but, he says, the customer always comes first. He does not let the reviews dictate the creative process – a wise recipe in this day and age, when everything you see is so brand- and product-heavy, and consumers are longing for fashion with a deeper meaning.
Indeed, Van Noten has always been known for doing his own thing. When brands were spending a fortune on expensive ad campaigns, he refused to advertise in magazines. And when fashion houses started branching out into bags and jewellery to make a quick buck, he stuck with what he knows best: garments. His label grew slowly but steadily, and while all the nouveau riche started storming the stores of big accessory houses, the fashion connoisseurs all started to shop at Dries’.
“In the beginning we had no budget for publicity,” he recalls. “Then in the early ’90s, after seven years, we decided to do a fashion show, which for me was more important as a way of communication than publicity. We said, ‘We don’t need it. What’s the point?’ In our case it would have harmed the business more than help us, because people started to buy the collection for the clothes, and not so much for the name behind it.”
Born in 1958 into a family of tailors (his grandfather was a tailor and his father owned a menswear shop), Van Noten never ended up taking over his father’s business, stating that “designing is much more fun.” He was one of the legendary Antwerp Six (along with Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee) that helped stir up a bit of a fashion revolution with their minimalist designs in the mid ’80s. But Van Noten’s career really took off when his first menswear collection debuted in London in 1986. Women’s ready-to-wear soon followed, and by 1991 he was showing at Paris Fashion Week.
When asked about the influence of Antwerp fashion and his competitors, he laughs confidently, knowing that he made the right decision not to move to Paris. “There’s not much competition here in Antwerp,” he reveals. “So you start to think about clothes in a different way. The people know you, and they like you for who you are. A lot of the fashion designers I know quite well. We’re good friends. I studied together with Ann Demeulemeester and Walter. So it’s more like colleagues than competition.”
Van Noten shuns the limelight. He lives in a seven-acre house 15km into the countryside, where he enjoys a vast garden and entertains guests in the stylishly decorated home together with his partner, Patrick Vangheluwe, and their Airedale terrier, Harry. And, when he needs to visit, Paris is just a train-ride away. “I’m not afraid of the spotlight, but it’s not really something that I need,” he explains. “I love to live here in Antwerp. It’s really quiet. It’s very laid back and relaxed.
“I love gardening. My father was also a gardener. I just returned from a whole week I spent at home, and every day I was in the garden early in the morning until late in the evening. So this morning I had to choose fabric, but my hands are too rough. It always takes a bit of time transitioning from gardening to fashion design.”
His garden is not only a place of rejuvenation, but also his source of inspiration – numerous collections and patterns have been traced back to roses and other flowers, creating a style staple for the brand.
Also, a lot of research goes into his fabrics – tweeds from a small Scottish mill, velvet that has been burnt and printed, silver embroidery from India – fabrics that have earned him a loyal following, including the glitterati, who enjoy wearing his creations to red-carpet events.
But it’s customers out of the spotlight that he seems to appreciate best. “It’s nice when you see somebody in the street that you don’t know at all, a young guy or girl that had to work in a cafe on the weekend to earn money to buy your clothes. Sometimes this is a bigger compliment than a star, who just has to ring the press office and say, ‘Send me this!’ ”
It doesn’t mean that he dislikes celebrities wearing his clothes. Perhaps he’s just too understated to admit it or simply too busy to pursue brand endorsement on a grander scale. After many questions, he confides that he did a few outfits for Mick Jagger in the past and that he designed something exclusive for Maggie Gyllenhaal for the last Oscars. “But Maggie also became kind of a friend, because she often wears our clothes,” he adds quickly. “I also designed her wedding dress, which was very private. Nobody saw it, which is what I like. We have a lot of stars that wear our clothes, but they just buy them in the stores.”
Van Noten doesn’t care to turn his self-funded brand into a lifestyle empire with diffusion lines and safe eyewear and fragrance products. He’s perfectly content with four collections and not having to spend much time on accessories. “I don’t want to do pre-collections,” he says. “Many people divide their energy into different collections. I really want to put all my creativity into one big thing.” He rolls his eyes, loathing the idea of all the unnecessary work, mixed with a feeling of repulsion toward the concept of fragmenting your passion and devotion into numerous lines.
“I think the dream of every fashion designer is to take one season off. It’s the rat race of one show finishing and the new one starting again. I think every designer dreams of having six months off. But you know you can’t escape.”
But Van Noten is not afraid to praise or admire the ones that have walked the path before him and influenced huge consumers with their unique look, even if he never plans to go down that route. “There are many designers that inspire me,” he says. “That goes from Paul Poiret to Saint Laurent to Japanese designers that were discovered in the ’80s…even designers like Ralph Lauren, who has created an image for a whole nation. When you think about America now, you see white-painted houses. In fact you see the ads of Ralph Lauren.“
But despite his increasing success, he doesn’t follow fashion blindly. He laughs at the idea of collaborating with H&M, but he doesn’t oppose doing projects with interesting artists, such as the late Malcolm McLaren, who he collaborated with on his last soundtrack for the autumn/winter 2010 show, a juxtaposition of punk vocals and the Hitchcockian music from Vertigo. “This was a really fantastic collaboration,” he says about working with the former Sex Pistols manager. “But when my PR is saying that it would be good for my brand awareness to collaborate with a sports manufacturer, then I’ll say, ‘Sorry, but I don’t know these people, so forget it.’ I have other things to do. I prefer to be in my garden.”
He also refers to the new kind of luxury, and how our values have changed over the past couple of years. “Luxury has changed a lot. In the past it was eating in a three-star restaurant. Now it’s eating home-grown vegetables in a garden (such as his own) or somewhere on a mountain, or going to a small cottage where you find handmade cheese, and just having a taste of that in open air, that’s luxury now. In fashion it’s a bit the same. In the past, haute couture was luxury. And now finding a sweater in hand-spun cashmere somewhere in the hills of Nepal is far more exciting and luxurious.”
Furthermore, the fast-paced movement – in a world of digital access, instant demand and supply – isn’t something that comes easily to him. “If I want to know something about an African tribe, I can just push a button,” he says. “On the other hand, there’s also a bit of a fatigue, as people can see everything about every garment from the front, side, back, every shoe detail and embroidery. So by the time the clothes are in the store, everyone’s already seen it, and the next show is already there.”
When Van Noten voices his opinion about the debate among the fashion cognoscenti whether bloggers should be treated as fashion editors and seated in the first row next to the elite during fashion week, he’s blunt.
“I think it’s a little bit scary that a person of 14 years old, like Tavi [Gevinson] for instance, has more importance than the most praised fashion critics. It says a lot about fashion. People who need such a spontaneous reaction from a 14-year-old, who doesn’t have the education and the background to understand, might also show the emptiness of fashion.” But he says he understands that it’s all part of an evolution one has to live with, even peripherally.
I then ask how he sees consumerism, which is also, to a large extent, driving the fashion industry, an industry with designers, who are no longer creating for their own labels, such as his colleague Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang or Jil Sander.
“I don’t know where it’s heading, and it scares me,” he tells me openly. “Nowadays when you see fashion shows, there’s something missing – the personal touch. You feel that many things are done by a team, and everything becomes a product. A lot of the emotion is gone. And I think it’s such a pity for fashion. All the skills are disappearing. Maybe I’m just a romantic.”](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lw97whWzSU1qcdg4no1_500.png)
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