Lunchtime is sacred at Dries Van Noten. The well-sweatered staff of its five-storey headquarters in Antwerp have never heard of Sweetgreen, let alone eaten it. Every day at around 1 p.m., the harbourside office grinds to a peaceful halt, with staff pulling out home-cooked meals in jewel-toned bowls. On the tippity top floor, at a well-worn, long wooden table, the senior staff come to sit at their white place mats. Nico, the chef, has been making them lunch for years.
Today, Nico serves eight: Dries Van Noten, his creative successor Julian Klausner, the brand’s communications directors and senior staff, our photographer Lukas, and me. He serves beautifully plated endives au jambon with mashed potatoes. Afterward, he brings out dessert: stunningly spherical grapes, each half green and half purple, like they were Willy Wonka’d downstairs in the pattern cutting studio, and vanilla Belgian waffles.
“The office food is very important,” Van Noten says moments before we sit for lunch. “A lot of times, we sit together around the table and automatically you also talk about the food—”
“—and you often make analogies between cooking and making fashion,” Klausner adds, completing Van Noten’s thought. “The ingredients and recipe, it’s comparable to fashion.”
This year, Van Noten and Klausner will attempt to pull off one of fashion’s trickiest recipes: the creative director flip. After 38 years transforming the wardrobes of the chicly exuberant, Van Noten is passing the floral baton to Klausner, a six-year veteran of the brand’s design studio. What could go wrong?
“It would be a pity to just make interpretations of things we did in the past. That’s not how I worked, and that’s the last thing that I would expect from the person who comes after me.”
DRIES VAN NOTEN
Dries Van Noten HQ feels like a place where nothing bad has ever happened, actually. A sense of pragmatic optimism is tangible in the space, where vintage furniture (most sourced by Van Noten himself) clashes with gigantic Pop and Abstract Expressionist art. Photographs from store displays rub elbows with rails of clothes and fabrics. The desks of staff, many of whom have been with the company for close to 10 years, are cluttered with character—mementos from runway shows and events. A photo of seven people smiling at Van Noten’s final show, held in Paris in June 2024, is taped to a pillar. It feels like family.
In many ways, Dries Van Noten was a family business from the start. The child of garmentos, 66-year-old Van Noten grew up around clothes. “My grandfather had stores, and I was inside his men’s store almost daily,” he explains. “When I was 12, my father and mother opened their own store, and I was always there or travelling with them to Düsseldorf, Paris, Florence to buy collections. It always was the most natural thing that clothes were around me, to touch fabrics and see all the beauty.”
In his teens, Van Noten designed his first garments at Belgium’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, evolving into a menswear business in the late 1980s. By the 1990s, he was the hottest new thing, welcomed to the international fashion stage as one of the Antwerp Six—the biblical cabal of avant-gardes.
Of the original six (Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, Marina Yee, Walter Van Beirendonck, and Van Noten), only Van Beirendonck still produces seasonal collections himself. Demeulemeester’s brand has changed ownership. The others fell off the fashion calendar completely. Dries Van Noten’s star has only risen—to the extent that, among the world’s most stylish figures, he’s come to be affectionately referred to as Driesus Christ.
On paper, a Dries Van Noten collection is difficult to describe or, honestly, can sound not totally right. It is always about prints, crashes of colour like coral into woodsy green, or raspberry sequins against a pale blue crepe. Accessories are shapely and striking, with orb rings and acidic opera gloves, and pumps with backward curved heels made entirely of tinsel. Sober styles, like a walnut plaid suit, drip with crystal strands. Silk shirts, printed with Marilyn Monroe, are imbued with seriousness, never camp. That’s Dries Van Noten’s magic: He makes wrongs feel right.
“There’s something almost metaphysical about Dries Van Noten clothing,” Amanda Murray, an international fashion plate and collector of Dries Van Noten, tells me. She singles out the relationship Van Noten has built with people who wear his clothes, even those he’s never met. “He held us in high regard, his consideration transmuted into the details,” she continues. “It’s nice to know you’re being thought of. It’s a layer of warmth that isn’t found in many brands today.”
When his retirement was announced in March 2024, the online fashion community fell into a state of mourning, reactions ranging from “I’m devastated to read this as a devoted customer for 30 years” to “I want to do a Mona Bismarck and not come out of my bedroom for three days.”
Six years before that, a young Belgian designer by the name of Julian Klausner received a random phone call.
“Dries Van Noten is looking for somebody. Would you be interested in interviewing?” Klausner recalls. “I didn’t hesitate. I came here and met Dries and Patrick [Vangheluwe, Van Noten’s partner in life and business] at the first interview. It felt really natural.”
“I always want to have Dries’ honest opinion. The difference now is I have the final word.”
JULIAN KLAUSNER
At 33 years old, Klausner has a gentle, enchanting demeanour, complementing Van Noten’s harder Flemish accent with a lyrical Francophone lilt. He wears a navy sweater and loose jeans, like Van Noten, with wide folded cuffs falling over black oxfords. Raised in the French parts of Belgium, and trained at La Cambre, Klausner is a Millennial, but his spirit is rich with a sense of well-earned depth. In the day we spend together, he doesn’t talk about the internet or “pop girlies.” He’s an old soul, arriving at a young house (compared to much older stalwarts, like Lanvin or Chanel), bringing a contemporary joie de vivre.
“Julian was always quite clear with his opinion, and that’s exactly what I’m looking for,” Van Noten says of his first impressions of the man inheriting his legacy. Being different was the whole point of hiring him. “I always call it ‘learning to eat olives.’ You need people who can convince you that something is good,” Van Noten elaborates. “They have to teach you. Because as a designer you need constant evolution. Your taste has to grow. And for that, I always wanted to have people around me who could explain to me, ‘Look, there’s something, maybe you’re not going to like it, but you have to dive in.’ Julian really brought an edge to my vision. He knew exactly how he had to push me, and to convince me, and to stimulate me.”
Now it’s Klausner who is directing a staff who will bring him new strains of olives. When the decision was mutually agreed upon between Van Noten and Puig (the Spanish conglomerate that owns the brand) for Van Noten to step down, a search began in earnest for a replacement. Klausner received no special treatment, asked to submit a brief like every other designer who applied.
What was the brief? Van Noten, prodded by journalists for four decades, knows when to be coy. “Don’t talk too much about it,” Van Noten warns the younger designer. Ditto for what Klausner will present on the runway in March with his debut collection as creative director. “My answer to a question like that was always: It brings bad luck when I talk about a collection before it’s been presented,” declares Van Noten.
What the duo will reveal is the spirit that will be maintained at the brand. “I don’t really feel like I have to keep …” Klausner begins before quietly trailing off. “Of course I want to keep things. That’s a different intention—the prints, the colours, the textures. I think those are really a key part of the heritage here. The craft … we’ve built amazing relationships with a lot of suppliers and craftsmen. That is what I want to continue working on. But I feel like I have a lot of freedom.”
“For me, as long as Julian keeps the soul of the brand alive, the rest he can fill in the way he wants,” Van Noten quickly adds. “I also expect that, because I think it would be a pity to just make interpretations of things we did in the past. That’s not how I worked, and that’s the last thing that I would expect from the person who comes after me.”
Klausner’s peers at the cutting table are now his employees, and his former boss is now his consigliere. “When we see each other, it happens very naturally—we go back very quickly to a very free exchange of opinions and ideas,” says Klausner of running ideas by Van Noten, who still works at the company overseeing store design, beauty and fragrance, and special projects. “I always want to have Dries’ honest opinion. The difference now is that I have the final word.”
Klausner’s first words as creative director will be presenting during fashion’s big year of change, with Chanel, Celine, Bottega Veneta, Lanvin, Givenchy, Tom Ford, Maison Margiela, and more (if you believe the gossip at the time of printing) welcoming new creative leads. “It’s good for fashion that changes are happening,” Klausner says of being a part of the industry’s sea change. But the Dries Van Noten business, even with more stores opening on the horizon and a budding beauty empire, is different from other behemoths—and not just for its familial spirit. “Ninety-four percent of our business is the clothes,” Van Noten proudly declares.“We sell garments.”
“There were a lot of beautiful things said when Dries stepped down,” Klausner adds, “but the heritage and the legacy is more than images or shows. It’s in the clothes: the clothes people kept, that they wore many, many times, and that they still wear. It’s really about the clothes in the wardrobe in the end.”
“We make clothes that people can wear—and clothes that people like to wear. As long as you do that, no problem,” Van Noten smirks at the new guardian of his legacy. “It’s like we talked about food. You can move from Italian cuisine to Asian cuisine and bring other elements in. Each dish is different, but in the end, as long as it’s delicious and people love to eat it—perfect.”
written by STEFF YOTKA
photography LUKAS WASSMAN
This story originally appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue