This was the softest of launches for Julian Klausner at Dries Van Noten following his announcement as its creative director last month. In advance of showing his first womenswear collection as DVN’s brand captain on the runway in Paris in March, Klausner today released the very first menswear collection on his watch.
Where soon he will face the scrutiny of a live audience for the first time, here he stayed shrouded behind the romantic soft focus of a Willy Vanderperre shoot accessorized by a quoteless press release. That release firmly specified that this collection was “designed by the Dries Van Noten Studio and directed by Julian Klausner,” to indicate that it does not carry his full creative signature.
It was partially inspired by William Burroughs’s The Wild Boys, that release also disclosed, but the author’s futuristic underground movement appeared here to have been time-machined to Antwerp in the early 19th century. Raffish, vagabond, and sexy, this was a crew cast dreamily adrift and apparently profoundly washed out. One lounged by a life preserver in a pink canvas trench coat pinned with flowers and worn over pleated shorts, tights, and biker boots. Another sprawled by a jolly boat in a patchwork knit coat and shorts. One more sat pensively against a weathered boathouse in a full-sleeved camel blazer and a dramatically bow-fronted rose-hued shirt.
The cavalier aesthetic of the clothes was in contrast to the cadaverously wan mien of their doe-eyed protagonists. There was a further contrast between the lushness of the fabrications and the pragmatic roughness of details including the knotted white cord belts. Going on the evidence of this lookbook, Dries Van Noten is preparing to set sail on a voyage that explores deeply held sensation and mood through clothing and image.
