010: Spring Fling
Notes on the season and a letter of love for Dries Van Noten
Recently I received a reminder that spring, begrudgingly, is on the horizon. Spring, springtime, spring equinox, whichever is your preference, arrives in just under two weeks, and I relish its descent. For the twelve years I lived in Dhaka, spring was an absent season. Anguishing heat from which natural life renewed (mango, java plum, jackfruit, lychee, or as a romantic would say, aam, jaam, katal, lichu) to the floods of monsoon, and then the morning chill leading into temperate winter days, ideal conditions for lavish weddings for the well-to-do. Steamed pithas filled with coconut and date molasses for the homesick.
In the early years of my childhood, an interlude in the suburbs of London, the flicker of spring was an electric respite from the din of grey. Little memories remain of this time, but I recall bringing home a potted daffodil from school and fashioning one of my own from the cardboard insert of a toilet paper roll and sheer yellow tissue paper. My mother loved gardening in the garden that extended from behind our very English row house. We had roses and occasionally warm orange and vibrant yellow marigolds, earthy to the taste.
The fleeting spring makes me hungry for these memories, and the release and relief of escaping winter’s pall. Springtime is a heavy sigh, the curious beauty of recovery after decay. Beyond my window I see trees standing bare, its branches delicate, exposed and vulnerable. Soon they will show signs of the first kiss of spring, discreet buds that will give way to resplendent blooms. Why all this poetry about spring’s approach, you might be wondering?
Lately I have been thinking about the marriage of this transitional period, a combination of absurdity and wonder that ushers the new season. It is during this period I am once again ready to reignite my flirtation with clothes as my communicator after throwing in the towel by mid-January, succumbing to my hibernation state of a thick grey sweater and heavy black coat, both now in need of a serious laundering. When in dire need of color and contrast, texture, pattern and proportion play, I turn to the works of Dries Van Noten for inspiration, whose collections capture that precise moment of rebirth, not unlike the season of spring, a demonstration of beauty in the strange and unexpected.
This is not to confuse and conflate Van Noten as a designer for spring; he is a designer for all seasons. Van Noten is terrifically adept at reinterpreting the banality of florals (for spring? Groundbreaking.), depicting them in their natural or highly unnatural states on extraordinary canvases, either in full rot and decay, encased in melting blocks of ice, its sweetness amusingly offset with bungee cords, or accompanied by a shock of radioactive hues (and in his Spring and Fall 2024 collections, there is but nary a floral in sight, cleverly subverting what we think we know of the designer).
Van Noten’s works are of an atypical beauty, and are largely anticipated and appreciated by those themselves in possession of beauty beyond convention, who do not conform to a mold. Unlike most design houses that craft an image of a singular woman, Van Noten reworks the schema to adjust for plurality. The women who occupy Van Noten’s universe are of diverse cultures, sizes, embodied senses of style. No two Dries women are alike, a directive imbued front and center in the designer’s mind. In a conversation with Tim Blanks for BoF, Van Noten underscores the importance of this both in business and design, “I design separate pieces, pieces that have to speak to a lot of different people, body shape, culture…price-wise, also.”
It’s worth noting that the usual suspects who line front rows and propagate the latest Its are somewhat absent from the Dries shows. Rarely, if ever, do the designer’s wares feature in their fit checks. Van Noten’s work demands the cultivation of personal style; he does not create for clones but crafts exquisite and complex tools for which the individual is tasked with the responsibility of bringing the clothes to life, to imbue them with their own personalities. The designer speaks to this in the same conversation with Blanks: “That people especially wear the clothes and use the clothes to explain who they are, to enhance their personality…as a way of communication, and that for me is a very important thing.”
Van Noten’s second spring womenswear collection, 1994, featuring Pat Cleveland
The fashion industry would merit from taking notes on Van Noten and incorporating them into their own stayed models. As the luxury market becomes increasingly inaccessible, I think of how Dries Van Noten is one of the few luxury designers to sell at relatively accessible prices. Expensive, yes, but the dream is somewhat tangible, and unlike many design houses, you get what you pay for: rich fabrics, lush embroidery, intricate beadwork. Each collection also offers styles that are generous and mindful of variance in bodies, uplifting rather than excluding. Van Noten stays true to the roots he established nearly forty years ago, whether its remaining loyal to factories and workers in India who have brought his imagination to life, or maintaining foundational styles that have not failed him or his clients, reimagining them each time to work in tandem with past seasons so that everything Dries is always en vogue.