Dries Van Noten

During my recent Berlin trip, I finally had the chance to discover the Dries Van Noten beauty line IRL at Andreas Murkudis (which is the only retailer in Germany who stocks these goodies). I wasn’t disappointed. For most designers, perfume and cosmetics are a rite of passage; they waste little time getting into the lucrative businesses. But not Dries Van Noten. For over three decades, he has been one of fashion’s rare independent operators who made his name not on licenses, but on clothes. And yet the 63-year-old is probably better suited to these things than many of his peers. “I said I wanted a rose perfume that is kind of a punch – really not a sweet, beautiful, feminine thing. It had to be something that men could easily wear. That was kind of the symbol of how we started to work,” he says of his fragrance lineup, which includes Neon Garden, one of the scents the designer himself has taken to wearing that pairs the freshness of mint with powdery iris, and Jardin de l’Orangerie, which blends traditional orange blossom with sandalwood for a grounded, earthy effect. What Van Noten didn’t want: “easygoing” perfumes. “I think there’s already so much out there in the market. The idea was that every perfume really tells a story – in my fashion, I’m also a storyteller,” he told Vogue. In total, the new line includes 10 genderless eaux de parfums alongside 30 lipsticks, a lip balm, as well as a select few soaps and creams. The collection also includes a series of accessories, such as a mirror, a comb, and more. The scents are personal, and so too are the apothecary-inspired bottles that they come in. Each is meticulously designed and outfitted with a cap that features the brand name engraved onto it. The bottles are colored to match the scent inside, and is bound to become a centerpiece on your beauty shelf as soon as you add them to your collection. As for the beauty offerings, the 30 lipsticks are available to shop in a range of three finishes. Fifteen of them have a satin look, 10 have a matte appearance, and five will be sheer. While some are neutral-toned, the collection also includes a vibrant purple shade, proving that the brand’s love of color runs deep. The lipsticks in this new collection are just as much about the final payoff as they are about the process of applying and playing with them. With this in mind, you can also buy a lip brush to go along with the shade of your choosing. What’s important, sustainability was also key in the new collection. Aside from being reusable and refillable, the lipsticks are packaged without plastic. Love!

Photos by Edward Kanarecki.
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For Dries Van Noten, the spring-summer 2023 menswear collection wasn’t just a bold return to the Parisian runway, but also an aesthetics shift. “The Zazous in Paris in the 1940s, and Buffalo in London in the 1980s. Both were in periods which were a bit similar. Hard times. So we wanted to make our own version of that.” Van Noten said he’d been researching male subcultures for inspiration this season. That turned out to be a strong opening statement: louche, dandified pinstripe tailoring, disrupted with lingerie-pink body-con “corsets” and camisoles. “Masculine-feminine” is how he put it. The Zazous were underground rebels who dressed loudly, frequented bars and jazz clubs, and defied the Nazi occupation of Paris. Buffalo was the subversive British style movement founded by Ray Petri in the time of Margaret Thatcher. In these, our disturbingly Right-swinging times, you could catch the significance of the timing behind Van Noten’s wanting to work a queer anti-authoritarian reference. That said, his suit silhouettes, with their double-breasted jackets and wide, drapey trousers were spot-on as non-disrupted standalones. The one that came out a bit later, the jacket and pants in two slightly different shades of burgundy was Dries Van Noten at his simple, elegant best. But he had other ideas about underground subcults going on. That turned out to be part of the reason behind his choice of the the rooftop of a carpark as a venue. “Garage scene grifters, cowboys, sleepy dreamers,” was the character gloss he put on the second half of the collection. Here, he delved into the motocross trend that’s sweeping youth fashion, hybridizing bike pants with track bottoms and translating them into satin; he also threw in Western shirting and styled cowboy boots bare-legged with shorts. This part didn’t really convince me – the result felt overly random. Yet in the heat of a Paris summer, it was easy to see an intended destination for this kind of casualized Van Noten dressing: next year’s festivals and all night raves, of course. He’s obviously out to catch a new young audience with this offering. But who knows? Hopefully the youth are more than likely to be going for those dandy suits instead.