Leave it to Julian Klausner to know exactly what is desired and to deliver. Set to the sound of Yo Ga Aketara – a song conveying the unique excitement of packing one’s bags and setting off for the big city – his sophomore menswear collection as creative director at Dries Van Noten hit all the right notes.
“I wanted to explore the idea of coming of age,” says the Belgian designer of the label’s latest outing. And indeed, the show’s out-of-comfort-zone narrative mirrored that of a city-bound adolescent leaving home for the first time, juxtaposing the comforting familiarity of inherited “friendly clothes” with contemporary, eclectic layering. The finished product shouldn’t work, but it just does. Each and every look is heavily layered and styled in an experimental manner that is interesting but is still distinctively Dries.
In the words of Klausner, knitwear was “pervasively present”. Desirable knitwear made up the show’s most memorable looks, from chunky Fair Isle and argyle pullovers and adorning accessories such as the collars peeking out of single-breasted coats, elongated woollen scarves and knitted earflaps gently grazing models’ shoulders as they strode down the runway.
Wide-rimmed, bug-eye glasses, roomy weekend bags and printed shoes added a further dimension of interest to each ensemble, the latter rendered in stripe and snakeskin prints. They were styled with interspliced patterns and unexpectedly bright colour combinations. Such as a striated ribbed turtleneck, the eccentric kind you would expect to see your peculiar yet cool uncle wearing out to dinner… or Harry Styles.
In this collection, comfort was key but not at the expense of the covetable, classic silhouettes for which Dries van Noten is known. We would set off to the city layered up in these looks any day.
Photography courtesy of Dries Van Noten.
