The Dries Van Noten show is one of my most anticipated shows of the season - after Celine of course. I love the way that Dries can successfully match creativity and eccentricity with a mind for commercialism and what women want. His clothes might be a little on the kooky side, but they sell, and people actually wear them - real people, not just fashion people - and they look so damn good. That's what makes him such a fantastic designer. He operates in a world somehow outside the bubble of trends and 'fashion' and magazine clippings, yet he is also at the centre of those very things because of the strength of his design and his ability to start fashion movements. He is somewhat like Miuccia Prada in that respect. I still dream about that fall 2010 collection filled with the doctor bags, the sleeveless trenches, the sweatshirts and evening skirts, the horn-rimmed sunglasses. I am currently - perhaps subconsciously - styling my summer outfits in the spring 2011 way, all oversized boyfriend jackets, loose languid silhouettes, and pastel mixes. He has a power over the way women dress even if he doesn't feature heavily in magazine editorials.
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I'm not the biggest print person, but I can objectively appraise prints with the best of them, and this collection is full of them. Kooky, almost psychedelic black and white swirls, oversized houndstooth, lashings of an amber and brown pattern that was like a geometric update of his old favourite 'rain' splattered silks, harlequin diamonds and his classic burnished gold jacquard. There was plenty of what the fash pack are labeling 'texture blocking', an idea cultivated by Dries in that fall collection where fur, calico, jacquard, embroidery and leather were all clashed together in one look. Dries has updated this for the new season with a host of tweedy coats with just one fur lapel, silk shirts with heavy embroidered sleeves and jackets with matching tobacco coloured leather belts and collars. He tapped into Chinoiserie and the opulent east with oversized kimonos over wide-legged pants - a look that recalled Phoebe Philo's spring collection at Celine and is a successful way of taking what is essentially a very dramatic and exaggerated look to a more realistic level. For evening it was all about the shift dress with Dries' characteristic slight drop-waist cinch, but this season in all manner of crazy clashed prints. Gone were the sweatshirts, the man-style sports jackets, the denim and the bell shaped skirts. They were replaced by wide-legged pants - still the shape du jour - and a host of boxy, belted coats, lingering tunics over skirts whose hems just poked out from under the top and slinky evening dresses.
But that certain Dries 'look' that is easily identifiable was still there. This is what makes Dries a great designer, rather than merely a good one. He evolves every season without completely leaving his aesthetic behind. Unlike Christopher Kane who seems to emerge, screaming, like a phoenix from the ashes after every outing (the only given with Kane is that next season he'll be doing something completely different), Dries quietly, successfully, forges the Dries girl. She has messy hair, oversized sunglasses, carries her bag in the crook of her arm and wears socks with heels. She loves pattern, belted jackets, jewel tone colours, wrap skirts, silk and ethnic touches. She's a bit of a magpie - gold jacquard trophy jackets and twinkling embroidery are a winner. I've always thought that the Dries girl is like a glamorous lady of leisure, that eccentric grand dame who brings her poodle to lunch and has a toyboy that looks like Baptiste. I'm not entirely convinced by some of the pieces in the collection - like I said, I'm just not a prints kind of gal - but then, that's the beauty of being a consumer. All I have to do is pick and choose what I like. And there was a lot to like.
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