March 5, 2026 |
This season, Julian Klausner brought the fash pack back to school – literally and figuratively. Staging the show inside Lycée Carnot, a local high school currently on half term, his AW26 Dries Van Noten collection took classic codes of academia – blazers, ties, baseball shirts – and injected them with punchy plaids and granny florals. But it also offered an education in Antwerp’s 16th century “treasure box”: Flemish paintings of peaches, tulips and fluttering insects, the fleeting beauty of it all stitched into every look.
Klausner had stumbled across two 1680s still life paintings – Two Peaches and a Butterfly on a Stone Plinth and Flowers and Insects – and spun them into prints that felt more like magpie collages than museum pieces. Florals weren’t saccharine but slightly blown up, sometimes pixelated, sometimes so sharp they looked embroidered. From afar it read prim, up close it unravelled.
The silhouette was vertical and purposeful, grounded in chunky heeled boots. Blazers were the backbone – some piped in contrast trims for a graphic snap, others cinched at the waist to sharpen the school-uniform reference. There were crested versions, duffels, bombers, denim jackets cut with almost proper precision but styled with a rebellious tingle. High ruffled collars peeked out from under knits, as if a strict dress code had been tweaked at the last minute.
Plaid came in plethoras – playground checks clashed in primary hues, or cut in opposing colourways and patched together. Those granny florals ran all over dresses and coats, occasionally sliced by pleats so they shifted in motion.
A spoken word soundtrack by Belgian artist gala dragot echoed teenage interior monologue underscoring Klausner’s point. This was about that in-between moment, when clothes shape you as much as you shape them. Uniforms, yes, but customised. Not nostalgia, more the thrill of becoming.
Photography courtesy of Dries van Noten.
