Dries Van Noten just showed its first collection without Dries Van Noten, and we’re not sure how to feel.
When it was revealed that Dries Van Noten would be stepping down from his eponymous label after almost 40 years, the fashion industry went into shock, with rumours quickly stirring about who would be able to fill his shoes. But with such short notice between Van Noten’s last show in June and September Fashion Month, no one’s yet been assigned to replace him as Creative Director, so the responsibility of creating the brand’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection went to its in-house design team.
The task of designing the first collection for a brand after its founder steps down is massive, and one that Dries Van Noten’s studio team won’t have taken lightly. In fact, it's quite clear from the brand’s SS25 collection that showed yesterday in Paris that the first thing Dries Van Noten’s design team did when mood-boarding this season’s looks was pull up their founder’s archives.
Since becoming one of the most successful members of the Antwerp Six - the group of Antwerp-based designers who all took the fashion world by storm in the 1980s - Dries Van Noten’s brand has earned its place as a long-standing fixture of the annual fashion calendar for many reasons. His designs are famously bold, blending classic and avant garde silhouettes and styles, and his shows themselves are known for their theatrics. It’s a combination that never fails to have audiences hooked.
This season, Dries Van Noten’s design team was blatant in its references to the designer’s archives, seen in a variety of materials, silhouettes, fabrics, and styles. For one, clean-cut, tailored silhouettes appeared as a nod to Van Noten’s family’s heritage in tailoring which sparked his own interest in design, as seen in the cinched waist of a patterned shirt and the sharp lines of outerwear. On top of this, the familiar deep purple and bright yellow hues that Van Noten became known for often incorporating into his designs were both prevalent, seen on silk shirts, lace trim, and plenty more pieces too.
Van Noten’s love of bold, eye-catching patterns was seen on every single fit, from snakeskin jackets and leopard print shirts to floral dresses and sequin skirts, layered on top of one another alongside bright, clashing pops of colours. Lime green, chartreuse, burgundy, hot pink, salmon, mauve, navy, and so so much more were all thrown into the melting pot of SS25’s palette.
Despite the obvious effort that Dries Van Noten’s design team went to studiously reference their founder’s archives, including practically every motif, symbol, characteristic, and hue from his first collection to his last, Dries Van Noten’s SS25 collection doesn’t feel like it lived up to his legacy. Whilst archival references and symbols of the house’s codes were littered throughout the collection, it almost felt like too much. Too many references spoil the broth, and that’s exactly what happened in Paris yesterday.
What we do have to say is that Dries Van Noten’s studio team did a great job of forcing us to reminisce the house’s greatest collections, serving as a reminder of why the brand is one of the most watched and respected in the fashion industry. Ahead of the house finally appointing its first ever Creative Director aside from Dries himself, SS25 felt like the brand’s life flashing before all of our eyes in a montage of every infamous moment up until this point. Let’s just hope that, after the flashing ends, Dries Van Noten’s next Creative Director will be able to keep the brand alive and kicking, because the fashion world without Dries Van Noten is not a world we want to live in.
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