Archive: Dries van Noten: how to pull off creating 100 shows
Originally published in 2017.
Interview by Olya Kuryshchuk
“Please get out of that system: I have to do a fashion show, Anna Wintour has to be on the first row, Tim Blanks has to write a nice review, and now I’m an established designer. That’s a pity. Please try to find other things.” Having experienced nearly six decades of fashion, Dries van Noten surely knows what he is talking about.
Growing up in a family that owned a boutique in Belgium – a place where helping out was common in his childhood and teenage years – Dries was confronted with needing to decide what to study aged 18. This turned out to become a rather rebellious choice: you see, the plan was for young Dries to eventually take over his father’s business, but it didn’t take long for the ambition to shift, and designing clothes (as opposed to selling them) became the dream. His father disapproved and subsequently withdrew his financial support, urging Dries to find a way to make his own money. With the contacts that he had acquired from the buying side of the shop, he knew several manufacturers in Belgium. “I went to them to say: look, I am studying fashion design now; would you be interested in me designing a part of your collection?” The offer was accepted, meaning that Dries was already designing commercial collections from the first year of his studies onwards, earning the money that got him through college. The rest? That’s by now become part of fashion history.
Dries is a firm fixture in the industry, like a man moving slowly, comfortably and confidently at a hectic road crossing. The competition – trying to catch its breath while chasing quarterly growth – doesn’t concern him, while neither does appealing to a mass market or advertising in magazines to get his stories told.
What’s on your mind these days?
It’s a strange time at the moment. It’s not a very fun time, with everything that’s happened in Paris, Brussels, the way the world is going… I’m not the youngest guy anymore, but I have never experienced this. The way that fashion is going also worries me. I always believed in pure creativity, and now I get the impression that deliveries are getting more important than creativity.
As a person I am happy, and my business is going extremely well. We are growing in a healthy way, so there I don’t have any worries; I have a very nice creative team. It’s the world that is a little bit strange, and of course as a fashion designer you always try to react to what’s happening. Quite often clothes help to counterbalance a little bit. I always give the example of when you don’t feel well, sometimes you put another sweater on and you already feel much better.