Dries Van Noten on display at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs

A member of the «Six d’Anvers» movement, Dries Van Noten is part of an avant-garde wave characteristic of Belgian fashion. For his first exhibit in Paris, he’s inviting spectators into a new project of confrontation, a multiphase discussion. Immersed in an intimate journey, the visitor won’t find a classic retrospective told from a third-person point of view, but will traverse rather the epic of Dries Van Noten’s collections right alongside him. For this initiation into intimate design, the designer is presenting his pieces opposite the museum’s archives, solicited a posteriori. This is how he ties his creative process to the notion of a dialogue between the arts, following the feelings expressed while enjoying a painting, a color, a scent, music, or a film. Each emotion is the connecting thread through a deliberately eclectic collection.

And so the discovery unfolds in line with Dries Van Noten’s inspirations, making reference to the Dior tailleur Bar for his wide black skirts in winter 2010-2011, Elsa Schiaparelli’s butterfly print dress opposite his male collection in summer 2000. You can also pick up traces of Jane Campion’s «La leçon de piano», Yves Klein, or Francis Bacon as seen at the Tate Modern in London. For this last reference, the inspiration is more literal than the others and consists of transcribing what is «horridly ugly and beautiful at the same time» with a unique relationship to beauty. He interprets the colors that were characteristic of the artist and yet so out of the ordinary in his Fall/Winter 2009 women’s collection, uniting a certain defragmentation of the garment in his apparel. The aesthetic questions beauty and ugliness, their boundaries and their application. But his work also gives off the geometric abstraction of Victor Vasarely, the expressionism of Kees Van Dongen, and even the bourgeois portraits of Jacques-Emile Blanche. Dries Van Noten doesn’t stoop to copying but writes a new story composed of the fragments of a diverse and historic voyage. This way of working through multiple inspirations comes forth through the use of opposites: male-female, casualness-stringency, tradition-contemporariness and Western-non. All of these stages of the designer’s reflection are decrypted in a poetic and romanesque way, recounting the story and dreams of an avant-garde.