Dries Van Noten
Overview
Dries Van Noten was founded in Antwerp in 1986 by designer Dries Van Noten and business partner Christine Mathys. Its first menswear collection, Sailing, was presented at the British Designer Show in London during the Antwerp Six’s international breakthrough. The house opened Het Modepaleis in Antwerp in 1989, entered the Paris menswear calendar with Spring/Summer 1992 and added a womenswear runway line with Spring/Summer 1994.
The company developed as an independent, designer-led ready-to-wear house, combining four annual Paris collections with international wholesale and a selective network of stores. Puig acquired a majority stake in 2018 while Van Noten remained chief creative officer, chairman and a minority shareholder. The partnership supported a broader retail presence and the launch of Dries Van Noten Beauty in 2022, centred on fragrance and refillable lipstick.
Van Noten presented his final collection for the house in June 2024 and stepped back from day-to-day creative direction at the end of that month. Julian Klausner, who had joined the womenswear studio in 2018 and later led it, was appointed creative director in December 2024. His succession retains the Antwerp studio as the centre of a house whose identity remains rooted in ready-to-wear, textile research and controlled category expansion.
Philosophy
The house begins with textiles. Prints, jacquards, embroidery and specially developed fabrics establish the collection before tailoring and drape organise them into clothes intended for regular wear. Colour is treated structurally: muted grounds, saturated accents and apparently discordant patterns are layered until ornament and cut hold the same weight.
Art, music, cinema, historical dress and garden imagery enter the work as research rather than costume. Menswear and womenswear move between formal tailoring, sportswear, evening fabrics and utilitarian garments, often placing austerity beside opulence within the same look. The result depends less on a fixed silhouette than on the balance of surface, proportion and styling.
That design language has been supported by long production relationships, a refusal to build the business around diffusion lines and a measured approach to retail. Runway settings, store interiors and beauty packaging extend the same interest in material contrast and atmosphere, while the post-founder studio is expected to develop those systems without reducing them to a static archive.
Timeline
Disclaimer
Creative timeline
Button TextJulian Klausner presented his first Dries Van Noten womenswear runway collection as creative director at the Palais Garnier on 5 March 2025. The collection extended the house’s textile and colour vocabulary through exposed construction, tactile surface and more theatrical proportions.
The Autumn/Winter 2025 menswear project was presented in January 2025 during the transition into Julian Klausner’s creative direction. Developed as a studio-led lookbook under his direction, it connected the post-founder interim to his first full womenswear runway statement.
Dries Van Noten appointed Julian Klausner creative director for womenswear and menswear in December 2024. Klausner had joined the studio in 2018 and led womenswear before assuming responsibility for the house’s collections and wider brand identity.
Castro Freitas served as Head of Womenswear at Dries Van Noten from 2017 to 2019. The role was senior and line-specific, while Dries Van Noten remained the public collection author.
Dries Van Noten presented the men’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection on 22 June 2024 in a former factory space in La Courneuve. The final show balanced light tailoring, shimmer and suminagashi-inspired print as the closing collection of his founder-led tenure.
Dries Van Noten announced in March 2024 that he would step down from creative direction after the Spring/Summer 2025 menswear collection, with the change taking effect at the end of June. He retained an advisory relationship with the house while the studio prepared the transition.
Dries Van Noten Beauty launched in 2022 with ten fragrances and thirty lipsticks in refillable packaging. Developed with Puig, the division translated the house’s textile, colour and material contrasts into fragrance and makeup.
Dries Van Noten collaborated with Christian Lacroix on the Spring/Summer 2020 womenswear collection. The project combined Lacroix’s couture shapes and decorative excess with Van Noten’s jacquards, faded florals, layered print and material discipline.
Seán McGirr worked as a womenswear designer at Dries Van Noten from approximately 2018 to 2020. His tenure included the period around the Spring/Summer 2020 Christian Lacroix collaboration before he moved to JW Anderson.
Julian Klausner joined the Dries Van Noten womenswear studio in 2018 and later became head of womenswear. His responsibilities expanded into casting, image direction and studio operations before his appointment as creative director in December 2024.
The Autumn/Winter 2017 womenswear collection marked the house’s one-hundredth show. Archival prints were reworked across a cast that included models from earlier decades, while a book and documentary expanded the anniversary beyond the runway.
The Inspirations exhibition presented Dries Van Noten garments alongside artworks, films, music and historical dress at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and later MoMu. It established an institutional account of how references are translated into textiles, colour and styling.
Patrick Scallon directed communications at Dries Van Noten from March 2008 to early 2022. He oversaw global communications and image strategy, fashion shows, exhibitions and cultural projects, including the 2014 Inspirations exhibition and the 2017 film Dries.
The house celebrated its fiftieth show with a dinner for 500 guests before the long table was cleared and used as the runway. The Spring/Summer 2005 presentation made collective ritual part of the fashion show rather than a separate anniversary spectacle.
Dries Van Noten appeared as a guest designer at Pitti Uomo with a menswear presentation at Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence. Produced with Etienne Russo and lit by cinematographer Pasqualino De Santis, the show used the city and its ordinary movement as part of the collection’s atmosphere.
Dries Van Noten presented the house’s first womenswear runway collection in Paris in 1993 for Spring/Summer 1994. The launch established the dual-gender structure that would support two menswear and two womenswear collections each year.
The Spring/Summer 1992 menswear show marked Dries Van Noten’s Paris runway debut. Presented in the basement of the Hotel Saint-James & Albany and produced by Etienne Russo, it established the regular Paris chapter of the house.
Patrick Vangheluwe joined Dries Van Noten in 1987 during the company’s formative Antwerp period. His long association with the house has centred on its business, retail and visual environment, later extending to the co-founding of the independent Fondazione Dries Van Noten.
Christine Mathys co-founded the company and organised the commercial structure that supported Dries Van Noten’s early expansion. Her work helped connect the Antwerp studio to wholesale, retail and long-term production relationships until her death in 1999.
Dries Van Noten founded his eponymous house and directed its menswear and womenswear from the 1986 launch through June 2024. Across thirty-eight years, he built the label around textile development, colour, print, tailoring and an independent Antwerp studio.
Dries Van Noten divisions and related structures
The house is organised around a unified ready-to-wear mainline and a later beauty division, with no established diffusion label separating its more elaborate and everyday products.
Ready-to-wear
- Womenswear
- Paris mainline
- Introduced on the Paris runway with Spring/Summer 1994, womenswear combines textile development, layered print, fluid construction and precise tailoring within the house’s principal seasonal programme.
- Menswear
- Founding line
- Launched with Sailing in 1986, menswear remains a core line built around relaxed tailoring, fabric research and the movement between formal, utilitarian and decorative dress.
Beauty
- Fragrance
- Launched 2022
- The Puig-supported fragrance line translates the house’s use of material and contrast into refillable bottles and gender-fluid compositions, following an earlier 2013 fragrance made with Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle.
- Makeup
- Refillable colour
- The beauty launch also introduced refillable lipsticks in multiple finishes, using patterned and mixed-material packaging as an extension of the fashion collections’ colour systems.
Related cultural structure
- Fondazione Dries Van Noten
- Independent foundation
- Co-founded in Venice by Dries Van Noten and Patrick Vangheluwe, the foundation is institutionally separate from the fashion house and supports exhibitions, craft and cross-disciplinary cultural work.
Dries Van Noten collaborations
Collaborations have generally been selective and project-specific, entering the mainline, fragrance or cultural programme without developing into permanent co-branded divisions.
Fashion and design
- Christian Lacroix
- Spring/Summer 2020
- The womenswear collection joined Lacroix’s couture vocabulary of ruffles, polka dots, matador jackets and saturated colour with Van Noten’s print, jacquard and textile systems.
- Verner Panton archive
- Spring/Summer 2019
- Menswear adapted motifs and colour research from Panton’s Visiona work, placing psychedelic graphics across fluid tailoring and sportswear in collaboration with the designer’s estate and archive.
Fragrance and film
- Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle
- Fragrance, 2013
- The Dries Van Noten par Frédéric Malle fragrance preceded the house’s own beauty division and translated its Flemish references and material contrasts into an olfactory portrait.
- Reiner Holzemer
- Documentary, 2017
- The documentary Dries followed the designer’s working process across four collections and became a major public record of the studio, garden and research practices behind the clothes.
