Dries Van Noten Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Collection
Dries Van Noten followers of a certain vintage will remember a circa 2009 show at the Lycée Carnot. Julian Klausner took us back to that Paris high school today, and even installed the same kind of floor to ceiling mirror at the start of the runway. Looking back and revisiting the specificities of a brand’s earlier era has become a kind of shorthand for incoming creative directors, often with direct one-to-one correspondences. Klausner is too subtle and too sophisticated to rely on anything so obvious.
The nostalgia he was interested in expressing was the kind many of us experience—for our own youths. Not long after his last women’s show, he visited the Lycée Carnot with his team. “The bell rang and hundreds of teenagers came pouring in,” he recalled, “and it struck me how universal and how intergenerational the feeling is, thinking back to high school: a kind of awkwardness and a slight cringe, also a certain joy. Clothes play such an important role in that moment of self discovery.”
Awkward and cringe-inducing this wasn’t. Quite the opposite. Klausner likes a slow build, so he started with the staples of school uniforms: a toggle coat, a shirt-and-tie, a preppy blazer—all quite strictly tailored, quite correct. But it didn’t stay uniform for long. Grungy plaids, 17th century still lifes (which some of the time he pixelated), varsity jackets, deconstructed denim—Klausner sampled references like high schoolers try on identities. Like Van Noten, he has a knack for the impossible combination: the collegiate jacket and a skirt paneled from rich embroidered ribbon; an opulent bronze jacquard coat with ribbed knit sleeves; a denim jacket and a skirt with pixels picked out in silk thread, sequins, and glass beads. The crescendo: a pair of jackets stitched at random with more embroidered ribbons, the way a young girl might scribble on her jeans.
All together it created a rich, heady mosaic, made more so by a soundtrack featuring the 19-year-old jazz singer Gala Dragot, expressing a jumble of teenage thoughts: “Is this what I think? Are you sure? Look around. I am wrapped in gardens, wrapped in words. She is of all colors. My pockets are full of words.”
As with the best Dries shows, the pleasure of this one wasn’t in its embellishments or its clashing, overlapping patterns, or the manipulation of those still lifes into pixels. It’s that so many of us—whether we liked high school or not—will be able to find a jacket or a chunky sweater or a sturdy boot, and make them work with what’s already in our closet.
