‘Quiet’ but gifted with ‘the talent of the shrewdest manager’: that’s how Dries Van Noten was described over ten years ago in the yearbook The Low Countries. Every fashion parade was a miniature spectacle that made everyone happy (no reserved places here! Van Noten sat everyone on benches next to each other), and every collection was a step in the right direction. And Van Noten likes to take care of his guests: in the summer everyone got a cool beer or a fan, in the winter there were blankets and hot soup. Because this is a designer who likes to give more than he has to. Take the show of his 50th (golden) collection in Paris in 2004 for instance: a long 150-meter-long table which also served as the catwalk after dinner, the finest silverware, an immaculately white one-piece table cloth and 250 waiters serving each guest at exactly the same instant.
Van Noten’s collections have been so well received by both editors and customers all over the world, that he was recently given a special award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America. As the New York Times noted, Mr. Van Noten said he was pleased to be acknowledged for what he described as ‘the right collections at the right moment’.
Julie Gilhart, fashion director of Barneys New York, the most forward-thinking big store in the Big Apple, gives Van Noten’s creations more rack space than Prada or Marc Jacobs. Yet she admits that it’s kind of hard for first-time customers to get into the Flemish designer’s mind-set. In an interview, she compared the clothes with their distinctive fabrics and prints to reading a new novel: ‘The first few pages are hard – you're not sure you like it. And then by page 50, you're thinking, Wow.’
Gilhart also pointed out that Van Noten is one of the few designers whose clothes don’t age. And that may very well be the secret of his success: how he, as a designer, learnt to stop worrying about fashion. Or in his own words, just a couple of years ago: ‘Now my biggest concern is what I make – do I like it, and are people going to want to have it. I don't really worry if it's good for the young girl or the older woman. I just try to make something really beautiful. Are all the hip stylists going to like it, yes or no? I don't care anymore.’
Ever since he stopped caring about ‘being with it’, his business has only grown. And that’s quite an achievement for a guy who hasn’t spent a dime, pence, euro, nickel, cent or whatever on advertising, because then he would have ‘to increase the prices of the clothes by 5 or 10 percent’. No…it's the small things like apples on the seats for those who attend his shows or slightly bigger things like pregnant Cate Blanchett braving the 2008 Academy Awards Red Carpet in a deep blue satin Van Noten gown that do the trick for this International Man of Sartorial Savviness.
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