“I tried to make things that people would cherish,” Dries Van Noten said Saturday evening during a cocktail party and dinner before his final runway show. Mr. Van Noten held his first show in Paris in 1991; now, at the age of 66, he is stepping away from his namesake brand. His retirement was a shock to many in a business where careers are often abnormally shortened or otherwise exceeded their expiration dates.
The decision to retire was not taken lightly, Mr Van Noten said. Whose is it? And it was destined to be a disappointment for the fans of the presence of this friendly Belgian on the scene. And there are many. Why? There was his evolved craftsmanship. There was his special gift as a colorist. There was his ability to distort patterns and modify the silhouette without compromising wearability. Perhaps alone among the designers of the famous Antwerp Six group to which he belonged, Mr. Van Noten produced commercially accessible, treasured clothing for 150 collections.
A pre-show dinner, a kind of cocktail dînatoire, the French term, was held in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. Fans from decades past – including designers Pierpaolo Piccioli, Thom Browne, Glenn Martens, Stephen Jones, Harris Reed and Diane von Furstenberg – floated through a vast space as waiters poured copious amounts of champagne and passed around trays of small bowls of beet soup, white asparagus with poached egg, foie gras and shrimp on skewers.
When a waiter passed by with a load of beef tartare appetizers, Edward Buchanan, the designer and Milan fashion director of Perfect Magazine, waved them away. Raw beef at parties is questionable, he said.
Asked about his relationship to Mr. Van Noten’s designs, Mr. Buchanan told a story. “Two years ago in LA, all my stuff was stolen,” he said. For months after the theft, he spent every spare hour obsessively searching the Internet for replacements – not of his personal memories, but of his lost Van Notens.
“I wasn’t really worried about anything else,” he said.
It was the same with Van Noten’s designs. You coveted them when you saw them and hoped to keep them for life.
So it felt bittersweet that Mr. Van Noten’s farewell collection, shown on a long catwalk, poetically covered with bits of silver leaf so light that they fluttered through the air, included many cornerstones of his graceful, unobtrusive mastery. The show opened with an austere lightweight overcoat that suggested something austere was to follow, an impression quickly offset by a parade of sheer peek-a-boo trousers, dusters, overshirts and double-breasted suits, buttoned low and sloppily in the manner of film noir -gangsters.
Hawaiian Punch florals in cool black and white and paired with snakeskin patterns were followed by iridescent metallic trousers and tunics in gold-silver fabric that moved like molten metal. The effect was both minimalist and wizard-like.
If there is no other reason to regret Mr. Van Noten’s retreat from fashion, there is his sense of color. Could another designer wear a taupe field jacket with pleated chest and sleeve pockets over salmon-colored fluffy shorts with raw hems and a pink-beige shirt whose color, in more backward times, Crayola crayons was marketed as Flesh ?
Let’s hope. Until then, the smart money is looking at a serious uptick in online sales of vintage Dries Van Noten. As Mr. Buchanan realized when his bleach-soaked denim jacket was swept away, Joni Mitchell was 100 percent right when he said he doesn’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
