Piece of the Week: The Two Volume Dries Van Noten Book

Dries Van Noten is one of the fashion world’s most beloved independent designers. His approach to this insanely fast paced industry is to do things at his own rhythm. He only produces four collections a year (two for womenswear, two for menswear), he doesn’t do any advertising and he runs his company from his home country of Belgium, instead of one of the four fashion capitals. Even when its time to celebrate a milestone Van Noten does it in his own way.

So when he reached his 100^th collection in March 2017 he decided it was time to commemorate a lifetime of making visually ambitious clothing with not one, but two, books covering Shows 1 – 50 and shows 51 to 100  respectively.  The two volumes reveal how Van Noten was able to bring to life his collections, which are just as romantic, poetics and lovely as they are envelope pushing in terms of their mélange of prints, fabrics and patterns, via fashion shows that highlighted the emotional core at the heart of each offering.

One of the two Dries Van Noten tomes.

“I like the idea that this commemorates my past so that I may just focus on the future and further evolving as a designer from now. I originally published a book to commemorate my 50^th show and so it came naturally to also do so for the 100^th”, said the designer about his decision to create the tomes. “It is exciting having all the shows in this special object, being able to remember, read and understand the context and inspiration of a show through texts and pictures, not only about the show itself but also on everything surrounding it,” he added.

The books are filled with never before published pictures that run alongside accounts of his genre defying shows and explore his unique sartorial aesthetic. Writers Susannah Frankel (for the womenswear shows) and Tim Blanks (for the menswear shows) paint a picture with words to accompany the over 2000 images. Resulting in two books that conjure up a sensation that is pretty much as close as you can get to that of actually attending a Dries Van Noten show.

The books will be published by Lannoo Publishers and will drop worldwide on the 1^st of October 2017.

Jessica Michault

Jessica Michault is the Senior Vice President of industry relations at GPS Radar by Launchmetrics. She is also the editor-at-large for ODDA magazine and contributes to publications like the New York Times, the Business of Fashion, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Mixte magazine.