The Dries Van Noten show started with the unmistakable sound of a woman’s heels clicking down a street, a low rumble of cars honking and people talking and laughing in the background. It might’ve been recorded outside on the Quai Malaquais, near the Dries store, which has been packed with shoppers in the early days of Paris fashion week.
Julian Klausner has managed what might qualify as the smoothest designer handover we’ve seen in the last two years—and we sure have seen a lot of them. His new spring collection was his best yet: confident, colorful, and full of collectible prints—a real star-is-born moment.
“I thought it was nice: this very universal feeling of sometimes wanting to feel glamorous, sometimes wanting to feel like a star,” he said at a preview. Working with his studio, he landed on vintage movie posters as a concept, dreaming up pulpy film titles like Lacquer and Lace, Vipère, and Ruffle Her Feathers, and then “telling the full story [of the movie] in one image.” Glamorous but casual was the sensibility he looked for, an effect he achieved by printing the posters on breezy viscose trenches and unstructured slip dresses, along with more substantial, but still easy pullover tops and paperbag-waist skirts. His contributions to the great skirt resurgence of spring 2027 also included slimmer versions with retro stencil prints of cocktail glasses and winged eyeliner eyes.
Layering, as it is in real life, was on the agenda: cropped jacket over patchwork slip dress over vintage movie tee, or an embroidered blazer with a button-down, a stenciled skirt, and a double-strand of beads. Klausner also used belts and brooches to gently nip waists and give everything from sack dresses to boyfriend-sized striped polo shirts a soigné drape.
Completing the picture were classic pumps with substantial heels and loafers with littler ones, for a star’s off days. The models carried large, but softly constructed bags in the crooks of their arms. “It’s quite a believable proposal for walking around the city,” said Klausner. That it was, but his star isn’t without her idiosyncrasies: notice the solo gloves and the almost grungy vibes of a shrunken tee under a ditzy floral dress.
The movie posters included credits, and if you looked closely in the top right corner you could just make out the designer’s name. When that detail was pointed out to him at a pre-show preview, he laughed a bit shyly. “It’s pretty weird,” he admitted. “I’m so used to seeing Dries’s name everywhere. I have to get used to it, but it’s fun to think that somebody will be walking around with my name on their dress.” Klausner is utterly at home in the director’s seat.
