You can tell a lot about a fashion designer by the celebrities in their front row. When career provocateur Jeremy Scott made his debut at Moschino in Milan last week, his A-lister-on-call was Katy Perry, who kept the audience waiting almost an hour before holding up proceedings further by staging a photocall on the catwalk before the show. At Dries Van Noten, the first big-name show of Paris fashion week, the guest of honour was Thom Yorke of Radiohead, who arrived promptly, soberly dressed, and did not cause any discernible fracas.
Dries Van Noten is a brand for grown-ups, a name respected by connoisseurs. It is opulent, but not silly. It is a label worn by serious people - despite the sumptuousness of its fabrics and vibrancy of its colours. Van Noten himself is designer and chief executive of the company he founded, which has 470 stockists worldwide and an annual turnover of more than €50m. He still owns 100% of the company.
Van Noten is unusual in running a profitable fashion company that sells mostly clothes. This sounds counterintuitive, but for most brands the leap into profitability is made when the brand is well-known enough to start selling a high volume of accessories, which have high profit margins and which themselves function as mobile advertising campaigns for the label. Van Noten has built a successful label selling proper clothes to men and to women, while sticking to an old-fashioned business model - just two menswear and two womenswear collections a year, half of the number produced by most labels, and with a distinctly low-key brand of celebrity ambassador.
It is unlikely that Dries Van Noten will figure heavily in Sunday's Oscar red carpet. But the Belgian designer will have his name in lights in Paris on Saturday, when he becomes one of the few living fashion designers to be honoured with an exhibition at the Musée Des Arts Décoratifs, fashion branch of the Louvre. The exhibition, entitled Inspirations will display 180 pieces of Dries Van Noten clothing alongside the works that inspired them. These include Christian Dior, Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent pieces from the museum's archives; photography from Dries Van Noten's personal collection, and art on loan by John Singer Sargent, Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst among others.
The exhibition also includes video footage of the Indian embroiderers who have worked on Dries Van Noten collections since 1987. An obsession with textile runs through the label's 37 year history. The collection currently in store featured, in its catwalk showcase, a modern reproduction of a floral brocade found by Van Noten in the archives of the museum when he was researching his exhibition. He used the fabric inside out in some pieces, the better to celebrate the bundled threads of silk yarn that the designer felt expressed the craftmanship that lies at the heart of beautiful fabric.
'Unexpected elegance' was Van Noten's considered backstage soundbite, after the debut of his autumn 2014 collection in the majestic hall of the Hotel de Ville. 'I was interested in moving between 2D and 3D, he said of clothes which featured hand-painted and woven poppies and ornamental three dimensional silk lilies. 'I like the freedom of hand-painting against very controlled, graphic lines.' Flowers are a recurring motif in Van Noten's work - he is a keen gardener - and for autumn, flag-width strips of vivid florals were alternated, circus-tent style, with solid sequins or matt jersey. A simple navy sweater with a spray of silver flowers woven over one shoulder looked likely to be a particularly winning piece.
The collection threw its weight behind a strongly emerging trend for next season, of a midi-length skirt worn with a sweater. A ribbed French navy jersey was teamed with a fluted calf-length skirt in stripes of petrol blue jersey and copper sequins, while a simple black wool T-shirt with gathered sleeves was teamed with a longer length pencil skirt in black and silver.
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