Swathed in lavish mélanges of color and pattern, a congregation of young bohemian women sprawled in transcendental serenity across a mottled carpet of multitoned mossy greenery. Makeup-free with hair more everyday wash-and-wear than undone-for-the-runway, they created a poetic mise-en-scène to end Dries Van Noten’s show. It was exquisite.
Van Noten envisioned an “erudite Pre-Raphaelite” inspired by Millais’ “Ophelia.” “A girl floating” (which sounds friendlier than “a girl drowning”) he said during a preview. “And Arts and Crafts…‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ fascinations with the moon and the sun…[and being] fascinated by nature.”
A moody luminosity prevailed, and one could see that Arts and Crafts influence in the intricately wrought fabrics in a rich, organic palette — golds, greens, blues, purples — bold and dusty at the same time. These radiated a fairy-tale aura, as if from some faraway time or place. In fact, they were the work of highly skilled modern craftspeople. For Van Noten, surface interest is integral to, rather than tangential or an add-on to, the design of the clothes. Here, he mixed masses of prints, jacquards, fils coupe, embroideries and indigo-and-metallic-gold denim. Impossibly complicated jacquards changed course to reveal two or more different weaves: a coat moving from metallic-blue yoke to red-and-gold sunburst body; a pair of pants changing pattern abruptly at midcalf, each leg in one piece of woven cloth.
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Van Noten’s shapes were diverse and many — collared coats, kimonos, tunics, bandeau tops, pants, shorts and dresses in tiered, floating layers — diverse in their combinations of shapes and surface activity but unified by their sense of freedom, exotica with ease.
Van Noten is one of fashion’s great creators whose maximal, artful aesthetic has the power to awe, as it did here. So much so that one could miss his facile attention to such pedestrian matters as age and end use. For all their heady, hippie romance, these dazzling clothes were remarkably real.