Meet the New Dries, (Kinda) Same as the Old Dries
Dries Van Noten, the man whom I spoke to right before he departed his eponymous fashion house, was not entirely uninvolved with the DVN Spring/Summer 2025 collection. However, it's the first DVN collection to be presented without DVN himself present.
No successor has been named for Van Noten just yet — expect news before the FW25 menswear collection is shown in January — so his design team took a bow at the end of the SS25 womenswear collection on September 25. And they deserved it.
The collection, a strong showing of brilliant patient luxury, upholds the motifs core to the Dries Van Noten brand.
We beheld glamourous dresses, statement jewelry and familiar layering pieces made revelatory by surprising textiles, all classic Van Noten touches.
That's good news for fans of Van Noten's distinct style of uncomplicated luxury.
But the design team didn't eschew innovation entirely.
Van Noten has never not turned out sumptuous accessories to match his sublime ready-to-wear, but the DVN designers outdid themselves for SS25, turning out some truly exquisite handbags.
Hefty snakeskin shoulder bags and robust knitted clutches mirrored the more-is-more nature of Van Noten's offering, arguably even stealing some of the spotlight and suggesting a renewed focus on accessories.
The thing about the DVN brand is, though the designer has a reputation for understated elegance, he's really a maximalist. Van Noten's collections were always packed with colors, textures, patterns, and prints. Sure, they were applied to unpretentiously plain silhouettes but that only served to ground their exuberance.
It's a neat trick that plenty of designers have attempted to imitate in years since but there was only one Dries. Luckily, his brand is in the next-most capable hands.
