FRANCE: FASHION - Masculine shapes mix with feminine fluidity to play on androgynous theme at Dries Van Noten spring/summer collection

Record ID: 197368

  • Title: FRANCE: FASHION - Masculine shapes mix with feminine fluidity to play on androgynous theme at Dries Van Noten spring/summer collection
  • Date: 30th September 2010
  • Summary: PARIS, FRANCE (SEPTEMBER 29, 2010) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF BACKSTAGE AHEAD OF SHOW WITH BELGIAN DESIGNER DRIES VAN NOTEN SHOWING PIECES TO U.S. VOGUE EUROPEAN EDITOR HAMISH BOWLES WIDE OF CATWALK WITH AUDIENCE SEATED
  • Embargoed: 15th October 2010 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: France
  • Country: France
  • Topics: Fashion
  • Reuters ID: LVA8E2VEVL2JJ7Y90WG9RWITPHX0
  • Story Text: The simple man's shirt was the basis for Dries Van Noten's spring/summer collection at Paris fashion week on Wednesday (September 29).
    From the button down shirt, other layers, from the sharp tailoring of an oversized dinner jacket to the fluidity of a dress would lay on top.
    The Belgian designer focused on clean lines and simplicity for next season, with natural ease and relaxed attitude the order of the day on the catwalks.
    Colours were soft, either white, lavender, pale pink or light blue with metallic iridescence bringing the clothes to life.
    For evening, a sleeveless jacket with gold stitched patterns criss-crossed the material and worn over black trousers to give the female form a masculine look.
    Van Noten fused the waistline, colours and structure of the 1940s and the vivacity and coquettishness of the 1970s with the dryness, masculinity and conceptualism of the 1990s.
    "It's a lot of menswear, like big oversized men's jackets, white shirts, kind of 90s, with a more intellectual approach, but mixed with more feminine things like flower prints which are bleached away and muslin and organza, all these things," he told Reuters Television backstage before the show.
    The designer made his name in the 1980s as part of the avant garde troupe the "Antwerp Six", a collection of designers who graduated from the Belgian city's prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1980-81 looking to challenge the standards of fashion. The group banded together in a truck and drove to London's fashion fair in 1988 to show their designs in a car park.
    When asked about a new generation of fashionistas discovering his label for the first time, Van Noten said as in the spirit of his youth in the Eighties, he was always looking for the next big thing:
    "I just continue the things that I like to do because that for me is the most important thing. I like to enjoy myself and always to surprise myself and especially to surprise my team and of course with a collection like this, it involves teamwork and you have to shock them sometimes, you have to shock them sometimes and say we have to do things like this or like that and it goes very well."
    Dries Van Noten also opened his first menswear store in Paris on Wednesday, to coincide with fashion week.
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