Our Man in Milan has morphed into Paris je t'aime and after a few days of worrying he might well be in the Seine or still shopping at Collette in comes a barrage of runway low downs from a few days front row in Paris. So here you have it...
There's nothing more tantalising in the fashion week schedule than a Dries Van Noten show, here's a label that has kept core to its roots since its inception, always with a distinct twist of Belgian brilliance. It's no wonder a fair share of The Established Man staff here have a hefty collection of Dries from season's past and present. One thing we could never do is take the kitchen scissors to our beloved Dries cardigans, military jackets and fine suiting but for Monsieur Van Noten that's exactly what he did. Was the location in a garage with cars et al for last season's show a hint towards the cut & shut style that was so vividly seen this time around? Van Noten took the contrasting collars and textures we'd already been seeing in Milan and Paris and took them to another level in his inimitable way.
The traditional men's mac seemed like the perfect starting block for some prime scissor-sharpening action to open the show. The resulting effect completely changed the visual representation of the outerwear in question. It's a brave man who will wear such a piece we imagine, but its totally do-able and very elegant. We're in Paris after all. With camel-coloured arms and belting paired with a main body of black the main corpus seems to become more slender and the arms elongated. It's a grand trick of the eye and a clever piece of engineering on the part of the designer.
From here on in it became one great big textile mash-up. There were plenty of simple options...striped shirts with plain sleeves, subtle navy mac's with black arms, white jersey's with navy sleeves, a charcoal and white strip blazer with navy sleeves. And then there were the more bold, complex pick'n'mixes like the school blazers in rich Yves Klein blue's with bold white stripes or a red & white ticking yet with their arms hacked-off to make way for a thinner lighter white and grey striped pairing. The bold stripes carried on down to trousers too.
For this was not to be one great big cut and paste showdown though. Amongst these juxtapositions there was some classic Dries to be had. Our winter coat list for later this year is already filling up just from this show. A dark grey single-breasted, knee length number caught our eye as the hand-held lighting homed in and aimed at it on the runway, given a slight cut and shut by the addition of a belt more commonly seen on a mac. Duffle coats, puffa's, a french mustard pea-coat and tweed overcoat all piled on in frantic note-taking. Then there's the suiting and smarter wear, often in a deep navy in this instance. Blazers were often worn with jersey bottoms, low in the waist and tight on the calves, high and low in one. A hint of the military came in olive green's, knee-patches and external pocketing.
The concept of vivid textures next to one another and colours alternating isn't a new one by any means this season but Dries Van Noten created a language of his own via one that has already been expressed on a fair few occasions over the past week.
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