As a defeated fashion world wakes up to the reality of Brexit today, you may understand why Thursday’s shows in Paris seemed that more emotional to an industry, who will find Great Britain’s exit from the European Union particularly hard to deal with. We were afraid it would happen, and suddenly every show seemed to reflect the benefits of an accessible world. Take Louis Vuitton where Kim Jones tapped into his childhood in Kenya and Botswana and reminded us of the colonial history that shaped Great Britain’s once so global outlook. Or Dries Van Noten, whose tastes and aesthetics have so often crossed the North Sea between his native Belgium and England, and did it again this season. “Contemporary arts and crafts, Edward Burne-Jones, Kelmscott Manor,” said the designer, who once dreamed of opening a store in the middle of Fortnum & Mason — that most imperial of British hubs.
Those references served as inspirations for his collection, a decidedly urban patchwork of unkempt nature scenes epitomized in Van Noten’s use of Flemish tapestries from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. “We piece them all together so it’s 300 little pieces stitched together with topstitching,” he said of a coat, the patchwork of which toughened up landscape motifs which would otherwise have been purely romantic. One Flemish tapestry remained intact in a coat, but Van Noten made that coat long and almost militaristic, constantly retaining a balance between poetry and power. Britain didn’t bring camouflage to Belgium, but our friends across the Canal were the reason we joined World War I in the first place. There were nods to the shapes of that wartime era in Van Noten’s collection, fused with the camouflage he’s so often used, but never as graphically as here. It was a tougher Dries Van Noten, less embellished— or embellished in a different way, as he pointed out himself.
You’d be inclined to call it sporty Flemish street style across the centuries. “It’s not really street,” he protested, “but I wanted to go a little bit less sartorial. We have the basic volumes but make them more exciting.” Volume was at the heart of the Rick Owens collection, whose Neil Young soundtrack — his, and covers of, After the Gold Rush — had guests holding back the tears. “When I listened to all of the words they just kind of summarized exactly what I was thinking about the show. He sang it as a young man. I listen to it as a middle-aged man thinking about cycles. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis thing,” Owens pondered. “I’m 54, I think.” He talked about last season’s Mastodon collection, how it was about the changes we all experience with age, how one faces adversities and what defines your character, and how the new collection — sculptural volumes so regal they were statuesque — was a departure from the brutality that’s often defined his approach to menswear.
“When I’ve done men’s clothes I almost revel in the aggression, in the anger. But anyway, I’m thinking maybe I’m taking adversity a little more seriously now. I’m thinking maybe there’s a more tender, gentle way of dealing with change and conflict, and that’s kind of where I went. The easy word for all of these clothes is ‘volume’, but I realized the word I was looking for was ‘expansive’. I’m thinking spiritual expansiveness: loving, benevolent—expansiveness. That’s what these clothes wanted to be.” Owens said the standout shape in the collection, “voluminous body bags that are caught up at the top in a tiny little jacket that just impresses them and lifts the chest cage up,” was his way of portraying an aspirational gesture that supported a feeling of something majestic. “All of that stuff sounds very New Age and it’s not — I don’t study any of that stuff and I’m not spiritual, but I do think about how people get through life in the kindest, most fulfilling, and gentlest way possible,” he noted.
“All of these collections are always autobiographical and about my observations about myself and what I’m going through, and what I assume a lot of men my age have gone through or are about to go through. It’s the human condition, thinking about cycles and beginnings and expanding and living forever, and realizing — wait, that’s not gonna happen.” You can see why it was emotional, Brexit looming over the fashion week atmosphere or not, and it contributed to a solemn mood throughout the Thursday of shows, finishing in Londoners dining together all over Paris, saying a final prayer for good news we now know wasn’t to come. At a restaurant in Saint-Germain, some of them talked about Louis Vuitton’s Kim Jones, how much they’d liked his dog collars and monogrammed latex coat that morning, and how he easily serves as a symbol of the benefits of a borderless Europe.
Educated at Central Saint Martins, which has received and produced talent from around the European Union, who have gone on to base themselves in London and receive support from the British Fashion Council and the British-owned NewGen, he ended up the designer of the biggest luxury house in Paris. Jones’ collection merged his childhood in Kenya and Botswana with the street of London, and the Parisian spirit of Louis Vuitton. “There’s always something a little London hidden somewhere,” he wrote in his shownotes. “This time it is the influence of punk — albeit via Africa, where Frank Marshall’s Renegades portrait series of Botswana biker gangs in heavy leather depicts the fusion of two disparate aesthetics. Add a third, the French elegance of Louis Vuitton.” The collection embraced a global mood that’s prevailing in fashion right now, amidst a surrounding world that’s opting out.
Credits
Text Anders Christian Madsen
Photography Mitchell Sams