dreams van noten TEXT ANDERS CHRISTIAN MADSEN IMAGE COURTESY OF DRIES VAN NOTEN
Be inspiring, get inspired. Dries Van Noten reveals the Inspirations behind his critically acclaimed new exhibition in Paris.
Dries Van Noten If inspiration is the stuff of which dreams are made, Dries Van Noten is full of ideas. About a year ago, he came up with his most ambitious one to date: the designer set out to create an exhibition featuring the original artworks, garments, and artefacts, which have inspired him throughout his 55-year-old life and 27-year-old career. Simply titled Inspirations, the exhibition opened at Les Arts Decoratifs during Paris Fashion Week in March, uncovering for the first time the fantastical facets of the designer’s mind. “It became very personal,” Dries tells i-D.co in a film about the exhibition, produced as he was putting the final touches to it at the museum. “For me it was clear quite quickly that we didn’t want to do a retrospective. I just think I’m not the person to do that. I still feel too young to do that. From there came the idea that we would work on the whole inspiration theme, showing where inspiration comes from, and how inspiration is involved in creating collections. Then, of course, clothes weren’t enough because my inspiration goes much further than only textiles and clothes from the past. It’s art, movies, music; all these things,” Dries explains. With works by Bronzino, Damien Hirst, and Elizabeth Peyton amongst a sea of other artists, and original fashion pieces by the likes of Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Claude Montana, Van Noten tracks the evolution of his dreams and his reality, and illustrates through a maze of majestic rooms the inspirations, which have shaped some of the grandest and most memorable collections of the past three decades. It’s all there: from Van Noten’s infatuation with Renaissance portraiture to his penchant for pop art, and some glimpses into the corners of the designer’s mind previously unchartered by the public. Opening with a kind of teenage bedroom space, the walls plastered with images of David Bowie and all the iconic people of the designer’s youth, the exhibition marks a new era not just in the career of Van Noten, but for the designer as a modern superstar, who’s effectively become an idol to his wearers much in the vein of what the icons featured in his exhibition are to him. Famously private and reserved in that slick way Belgians do so well, revealing his innermost passions – let alone putting them on display – was a sense of self-revolution. “As you know, my partner Patrick and I have always been very private about everything, but I thought it was strange to go so deep and show so much about how I work, my personality, my taste and things like that without then showing my house and my garden, which are very important to me. So that’s why we made the decision to show them in the book, which is also a little bit of a scary thing,” Dries admits, referring to the tome he’s releasing as part of the exhibition. Perhaps the most alive clothes have ever looked in a museum, Inspirations doesn’t just remind its visitors of Van Noten’s incomparable skill for the kind of electric grandeur he has trademarked. It also puts modern fashion into a cultural and historical context through the magnificent vision of the designer. “I love history, but I’m not nostalgic. It’s not that I want to recreate things that happened in the past,” he says. “For me, I really want to make things which are good for now, for tomorrow, and that is what my aim is.” Watch Dries Van Noten, Designers Worlds on i-D.co
76 i-D MAGAZINE