Dries Van Noten and Julian Klausner: How to Make a Designer Transition Work

Right now, fashion is being radically reconfigured by an upheaval in creative directorships, but I most definitely have not been in a position where I got to sit down at the same time with one of the industry’s éminences grises and the person who replaced him. That was made possible simply because everything about Dries Van Noten has always radiated intelligence, humanity and common sense (and beauty and idiosyncrasy and more glory than we have ever had a right to expect from fashion, but that’s a whole other thing). Dries without Dries might have struck ardent fans as an impossibility. Julian Klausner is proving them wrong, with his mentor’s unconditional support. Dries is launching his third act with his purchase of the Palazzo Pisani Moretta on the Grand Canal in Venice. He and his partner Patrick Vangheluwe plan to turn it into a major cultural centre. That’s one future. Meanwhile, Julian has a remarkable inheritance to take forward into another future. More than three decades separate them but that makes me think of them in generational terms. The family of Dries is big. They were both in their hometown, Antwerp. I was in London. We Zoomed.

Dries Van Noten: In the end, fashion—especially the way that we do fashion—is so intense. You have to be open to give a big chunk of your life. And then, of course, you kind of create your family in the office. I think the Dries Van Noten company also, seen from the outside, always felt a bit like a family. And it’s always been quite a family-sized company.

Tim Blanks: What’s the relationship between the two of you now?

Julian Klausner: We had a very kind of intense collaboration over many years, and I think we both went through a process in this transition. And I’m very grateful that the good relations keep going and it’s just very natural when I see Dries. The conversation just picks up and we still work very well together. So whenever I want Dries’s advice, we sit around and then we just have a quick catch up and they’ve always been very short and intense and efficient conversations. So it’s very fluid, I would say. No rules. Very instinctive.

Dries: It happens very spontaneously, actually, sometimes just by WhatsApp. And why not?

Julian: Or if I think there’s something exciting I want to show Dries, he just pops by.

Tim: Do you think of him as a mentor?

Julian: For sure. Just to go back to the house, I think Dries and Patrick really built the office and the company like a home. When I was given the role, I kind of—figuratively and literally—felt I was being given the keys to a home. Dries and Patrick put a lot of care and love into the building here. So I think we really have this responsibility of keeping up the house.

Tim: I wonder if it’s quite a Belgian thing that people make their work into their home. They create this sort of symbiotic relationship between their private environment and their professional environment. I just noticed that with other Belgian designers that there’s a strange kind of domesticity about the way they make a business. Am I wrong?

Dries: I don’t know because, of course, we can only talk really for ourselves. But, for me, if you have to do something as personal as creating fashion, really translating your ideas and your vision constantly, I think it’s normal that you do it in an environment which also reflects who you are and the way you really feel. And that’s not a cold business office designed by somebody else. OK, I would have always liked it a little tidier but, on the other hand, I know also that it’s fabrics and the whole thing that creates kind of a warm nest where it’s easy to make things which come from your heart. And that, for me, is important.

Tim: I’m thinking of the stores as well. That new store in London is so beautiful. And Talleyrand lived in that house, for God’s sake. Was that a critical part in the decision to open there?

Dries: No, no, no. But we thought it was quite nice that the man who helped Belgium become a kingdom lived in that building.

Tim: Julian, I mean, it’s the issue of legacy, isn’t it. You’ve entered a world that is quite complete and quite rich in culture and it’s all very visible. Do you feel that part of your role is to maintain that, and also to somehow evolve it? And how would you face that challenge? It’s interesting that you have to answer that question while Dries is sitting there.

Dries: I can leave for two minutes.

Julian: No, no, it’s a very nice question. I think this idea of hosting is very present in how I see the brand. I think the brand is welcoming and accessible, and that’s kind of in Dries’s nature too. And that naturally happened with how the brand is perceived. I do think that’s a really important factor. And I love how that’s translated into the stores. There is a kind of hominess there. I loved to go to the Paris store and see the people hanging out there, bringing a friend or a husband or whoever, enjoying their time in the store. So this idea of welcoming people in a space is really important. On your question of evolving the heritage, I definitely have a strong feeling of responsibility in keeping it like this. Dries’s way of approaching it was always very personal, very intimate and I feel that’s the way I have to approach it as well, whatever that means and however that will translate. But I think that I have to be myself and be quite instinctive with it, and if the world of DVN can start reflecting something personal about me, then that would be an achievement.

Tim: Julian, when an aesthetic is that evolved, is that something you share, or is that something that you have had to lean into, like a role that you have to assume? This notion of passing the baton in fashion, especially when it’s for something as idiosyncratic as DVN, is very interesting, particularly right now.

Julian: Yes, it has a very distinct identity but what I really see is that it’s a very wide world. As the head of women’s before, it was a joy to play with that world. It was like an elastic. We could see where and how far to push it. It’s so layered. And I think that Dries also always expected the team to give him a slightly different way of looking at what the brand could be.

Dries: I always said creativity in fashion is also selecting the people around you. And, for me, it was always important that those people were adding something and not just trying to do what I do because they think I know better. In that way, the team was always quite diverse. And as Julian said, it was really like I’d say we’re going to do a collection in black and white, and somebody else would say, why don’t you do lilac and orange? And I think Julian knows that I’m also pushing him now to gradually move things in a different direction. He’s proved that with the menswear. It was a very nice transition from the codes of the house, but there’s already a big chunk of Julian Klausner in that collection, which I’m very happy to see. I would be really sad if it was just a new version of something else. There’s a strong evolution and that’s necessary.

Tim: What do you think the difference between instinct and intuition is?

Julian: I wouldn’t really know. I think instinct is maybe more immediate, very more like a gut reaction. Intuition is maybe a bit more thought.

Dries: I think intuition can be still influenced because it can be an accumulation of things you see and feel. Instinct is really coming from your soul. It’s quite primal for me.

Tim: So, Dries, after so many years of having that interplay between instinct and intuition and having a way to express it, you did wonder, in one of our last conversations before you left the house, what your outlet would be now. Where would you find a way to satisfy your urge to express yourself?

Dries: I’m trying a lot of different ways to do that. Setting up this new adventure in Venice is quite fun and inspiring. Of course it’s a completely different group of people from other professions. Now I have to rethink everything. I have to reinvent who I am a little bit, what I’m standing for. That’s quite fun and scary at the same time.

Tim: Do you have to divorce Dries the man from Dries the business?

Dries: Yeah, but on the other hand, that sounds quite brutal. Also, I’m not really desperate to divorce. As Julian said, once in a while I still pass by the office. I’m still working on beauty and perfumes. I’m still doing the stores. Maybe at a certain moment, Julian will also be more involved in all those things and there’ll be more discussion between us, and it’s perfectly possible at a certain moment, I’ll say, “Julian, I think now it’s all for you.” That we have to see with Julian, and we have to see with Puig because I also think I have enough to do in Venice. On the other hand, I really enjoy the situation as it is now because now I have a little bit the best of both worlds. Fashion has always been my soul so it’s good there’s that kind of continuation.

Tim: Do you have a new perspective on fashion now?

Dries: Not yet. But I feel it’s changed a lot since I stepped down.

Tim: Seismic!

Dries: And not for the good.

Tim: But that degree of change is valuable because things have become very constricted and very predictable. Julian, do you feel like you’re surfing a wave of change in fashion?

Julian: I’m very excited to see what the new creative directors will do in September. I hope that fashion will be culturally relevant again. When I fell in love with fashion, it was really one step ahead of pop culture, really in the same rhythm as art. And it was really one step ahead. And then it fell a little bit behind and almost started following pop culture. The industry got a little bit lost in where it stands. But I believe in creativity, and I believe in the power of fashion and I’m very hopeful that we’re on the verge of a big change.

Tim: What do you think fashion needs to do to become relevant again?

Julian: Stand for its identity. I think that the houses should go back to their essence. Push creativity, push storytelling, and fantasy.

Tim: Independent thinking?

Julian: Yes. And a certain freedom. Fashion is a big business, there are a lot of responsibilities around it, and there’s so much talk of numbers. But I do think that the strength of fashion—at least in how I have always enjoyed it—is in the way that it can inspire you or transport you.

Tim: Dries, you were an icon of independence in the fashion industry for so long. When anybody said, name an independent designer, your name came up first. Fashion has lost so many of its independent designers and independent retailers. They were the two things that I think the domination of the giants destroyed. What do you think would restore fashion’s relevance, especially now that you have this elder statesman perspective?

Dries: I think you’re seeing more interest in the creative side of fashion. And I hope also, as Julian was saying, that people look beyond the numbers. For the moment, it’s as much the financial departments who make creative decisions as anyone else. “OK, let’s change designers and then maybe we have a kind of new momentum.” Of course, when every brand changes designers, I’m very curious to see how that momentum is gonna translate because of the whole craziness that is happening at the moment. But I think, anyway, you’re seeing young people who have an interest as much in clothes as in fashion. They are interested in dressing themselves, in communicating something with the clothes that they choose. It also has to do with everything being AI and without emotion and people are really trying to find things with emotion, things that a machine can’t create, things that you made with your heart. It’s not about showing off your money or putting celebrities in the front row. Who is waiting for that? Maybe some are, but, for me, those people are not people who wear fashion, they’re people who wear product.

Tim: So that’s fashion’s relevance. It needs to nourish.

Dries: It has to surprise. It has to make you think. The role of fashion is so huge. There’s so much it can do for a person. For the moment, I’d really prefer to talk about clothes than fashion, because fashion for most people is the Met Gala. Things like that, for me, are the worst part of what can happen through fashion.

Tim: So, talking about clothes then...Julian, do you think that clothes are actually the relevant part of fashion and everything else is just the noise that has surrounded the industry? Talking about change, how do you put one person in charge of a $12 billion brand and expect it to change in a way that’s going to make a difference? It’s madness! Do you read your reviews?

Julian: Yes, very much

Tim: Dries, did you read your reviews?

Dries: After a moment. Not immediately after the show, because then I couldn’t cope with them. I always had my postnatal depression. So I really needed my time to digest, to form my own opinion of what we did. After the show, I see only errors and things which went wrong.

Tim: Do you have postnatal depression?

Julian: I guess so. But I like to look at everything immediately. I didn’t know how I was going to feel, or if I would want to look at it. But I did. I’m just too curious to see what people have to say. Coming back to Antwerp, it feels strange, but it also feels good. I’m now back here in the office and I’m ready to start on the women’s, and I think, in the end, that’s also the advantage of fashion. It keeps going. So there really isn’t the time to spend overthinking the reactions. I look at it, I take it in, and then I kind of move on.

Tim: So you think you have a thick skin?

Julian: I hope so. Yeah, I think so.

Dries: You have to. Even when the reviews are bad. In my 140 or 150 collections of fashion shows, and we had good shows which were badly reviewed and vice versa. So you need to have a thick skin. But the good thing about fashion is you don’t have the problem of sitting somewhere in a corner half-depressed because you know the team is waiting for you and you have to start the next one, every time, over and over. And automatically you say, oh, this one was maybe not good in this or that way so let’s improve and let’s do this one better. That’s the beauty of it. It makes you as a person, it gives you the drive.

Julian: You turn it immediately into a positive.

Tim: Dries, you’ve been in the industry for long enough to go through the glory years when there wasn’t this weird social media animal hungry for sensation which just twists everything. Do you think that it was easier then than now for someone like Julian who has to deal with the immediacy and the cruelty?

Dries: You have a point, absolutely. Social media makes everybody’s life quite complicated because what people write can be so crazy, rude, and hurtful. These voices often don’t really have the background to evaluate a collection. In the past, every good fashion journalist knew about fashion history, had all that fashion culture with them. But in the end, a fashion show is something that somebody has to see. Even for people who don’t know about fashion, who don’t know the subtle references, it just has to create an emotion. Even people who haven’t got a clue about fashion, if they feel something at a fashion show, that’s the best. And that’s the aim also, I think.

Tim: How do you feel about that, Julian?

Julian: I like the whole social media thing, I like the fact that everybody can have an opinion. For the quantity of stupid or mean comments, there are just as many very interesting ones. You don’t know who the people are or what their background is but they have very valid remarks or very interesting things to say. And I always think that’s really exciting.

Tim: I guess at some level fashion is a dialog and maybe it’s even more so these days.

Dries: Who is the dialog between?

Tim: The designer and the world. And maybe it was a little more scripted in the past than it is now. But it just feels like one long, loud, permanent shout to me. I’m continually told that people have a different relationship with social media if they grew up with it. I’m curious about the notion of DVN as a thing separate from Dries, as this entity that people respond to. How is that for you, Dries? To see the name that you were christened with taking on an alternative life as this other thing?

Dries: Especially at the moment that social media started, there were always people who thought that they knew better what Dries Van Noten was standing for than me. People said, “Oh, this collection is completely not Dries.” Same now with the summer collection, Instagram reactions on the pictures: “Dries has clearly gone.” You want to say, “Truly sorry, but hey, I’m still here.” But you have to leave it. Don’t start that game of reaction. For me, it was a pity that sometimes it was reducing it all to color combinations, flowers, prints, and embroidery. I hope it will stand for more than that. That’s why we did the women’s collection, working together with Julian, which started with all the black silhouettes. And that was also what kept me learning this crazy thing which is fashion, because if I would have only done colors, flowers and embroidery... my goodness, I would have been bored like ten years ago.

Tim: So there are people who think they’re doing you a favor by supporting what they think is your legacy but they’re actually reducing it when they say, “That’s not Dries, that’s not Dries.” Because the world of Dries was a big world…

Dries: ...and a changing world. It wasn’t like a set of rules that I made. And that’s a good thing about working with people like Julian. They had to move my rules forward. They had to add rules, they had to add ideas. And that’s exactly how I always worked.

Julian: You never liked being defined. And I think that actually pushed you a lot to expand the world or provide new adjectives that people could then associate with the brand. “If you think it’s like this, then I’ll show you it can also be the opposite.” Over thirty years, that’s what led to a very wide and layered universe.

Tim: What is your universe, Julian? Dries’s universe was very wide. Frank Zappa, David Bowie, all these things were my things so I could relate to them very instinctively and was thrilled to see them coming back at me on a catwalk. Nobody else was doing stuff like that. So this isn’t me saying thrill me but how will your world be different?

Julian: It’s tricky for me to define my world. I think the process starts with something very instinctive. It’s about the intention. I think that material plays a really big role. It’s really very immediate with the hands and the eyes, and you put things together and these things evoke references and then they come together and the mind starts to make a puzzle. I am a sponge, I guess. Like Dries, there’s a million things that I’m interested in, and things that I don’t like that I’ll all of a sudden love, and things that I think are beautiful, or which I don’t think are not interesting anymore and vice versa. So it’s a constant evolution.

Tim: If I was going to be an old bore, I would say when I was 15 or 16, David Bowie changed my life and the way I look at everything to this day. I mean, the books I read, the music I listen to, the movies I watch. Somewhere he’s in my head. Social media has kind of obliterated the power of one person to make that change.

Julian: Exactly. But before social media, there were the Myspace years and my teenage years were the Tumblr years, a moment for images because they were non-referenced, millions of them, beautifully curated websites and moodboards. But it was kind of a strange moment where all of a sudden it’s people like Amy Winehouse who were referring to the sounds of the past, and it was the beginning of vintage stores and people wearing not one specific era, but a little bit of everything. So I think my teenage years are very much a big mix. It was a moment when we were just jumbling all kinds of things together. It was really not one person or one movement or one thing. It was just this moment where anybody anywhere had access to everything.

Tim: So do you look at somebody like me and think, oh, poor you, you only had David Bowie?

Julian: No, because I think there is a kind of huge power of not knowing that much. Maybe I fantasise about this, but travel in a pre-Internet time, you had to imagine what places were like. Today, you can go on Google Maps and position yourself anywhere in the world and look 360 degrees and there is no longer a fantasy idea of what a place can be. And the communities being in real, nightclubs or cultural spaces, physically realised, where people would find their people, find themselves. That has something maybe much more powerful than connecting online. So I don’t think that one is better than the other.

Dries: It’s a completely different thing. I think in the past there was much more dream and expectation and everything now can be easily fulfilled and can be turned into fact. Traveling in the past, you had many more surprises, good and bad. You booked the hotel, you didn’t know what it was going to be. Now you know every room. You have a million reviews. Everything is kind of completely pre-decided, and it takes part of the experience away, I think.

Tim: When I was a kid, I’d be lying on my bed in Auckland, New Zealand, dreaming that I was at The Factory listening to the Velvet Underground playing while Edie Sedgwick danced. And you had no film of that. You had the music, obviously, but otherwise, the whole thing was in your head.

Dries: But you can do it the other way round now. OK, you have all that knowledge, but you don’t have to see all that knowledge. You can decide to step back from it and still create your own world and your own dreams. And I think that’s what’s happening now a little bit. You can read everything about a restaurant, but it’s only when the food is in front of your nose that you know if it’s good or bad. That’s also with clothes. You see so many fake things, even more with AI, that you don’t know anymore what’s real or what’s fake on social media. But there’s going to be a counter reaction...

Julian: We were talking about it here with the team. AI is something that comes up a lot. Do we embrace it? Are we resisting it? You know, there’s a million ways you can use it. There’s a real conversation to be had about how you position it. There was this whole thing where a bunch of models or agencies lent their faces to AI. I think it was Saskia de Brauw who wrote a very nice post against it. At a certain moment, the ultimate luxury will be when you do a proper shoot with a makeup artist and a real model and a real photographer. And this will be kind of the future of luxury: having real people working together physically in one space in the simplest way.

Tim: Dries, what do you think of that?

Dries: It’s already been going on with fashion for a while. It’s not that it’s OK, it’s an evolution, and that makes it even scarier. But what is good when things go to an extreme, is that there is always a healthy counter-reaction.

Julian: I agree with you, Dries. What I just said about doing a shoot with people, somebody could have said 15 years ago about e-com vs. being in a real store with real people. I do think there is a desire and need to experience something in reality.

Dries: The shared emotion is important.

Tim: Which makes a point about your shows, Dries. They’ve been some of the most perfect performance pieces that I’ve seen over the years. They set the bar ludicrously high. How does that work in your world now, Julian?

Julian: Of course, it’s super inspiring, although it goes back to what we were saying about it being a different time. And I’m quite envious of that time, when you had to be there to experience a show and it was such a privilege and a unique one-off moment with such a high quality of performance. Today, it’s a different thing, it has a different function, a different lifespan, and people go in with a different mindset. Season after season, Dries would make a big performance out of it, but I think it has to feel right, it has to reflect the collection and the moment and the context.

Tim: Dries once told me he thought of the fashion show as the end-of-season reward for everybody’s hard work. Alexander McQueen used to say that as well. That seems a decent, human motivation. This is what we did together, and here it all is, just for us. And the rest of the world wasn’t there. Now the rest of the world is there because of social media. But maybe the thing about making fashion relevant again is simply something as basic as making it human again. Does that sound pretentious? Does that sound feasible? I don’t know.

Dries: It’s quite difficult for us to respond because we always have a very human way of looking at fashion. It really comes from your heart and it’s really something which you do in a spontaneous way. We’re back to instinct and intuition. It’s not the whole business thing. Let’s put a logo here, a logo there and hope it’s going to sell. But Julian was right to say there are so many different ways of doing fashion because there are brands who do logos in a very clever way and they’re very successful with it. Why not? We never did logos. It’s not that we tried to find a different way. It was just that we always did the things that felt right for us as a designer, as a house, and as a business.

Tim: The Antwerp Six were uniquely thoughtful designers. I know I said human, but maybe I also mean thoughtful. Julian, do you relate to that as something distinctive about the fashion that comes out of Belgium?

Julian: I would add authentic. I think it’s about being true to yourself. And that’s what I, as a young designer, always admired a lot about the other independent designers. When you can stay true to yourself and when it feels heartfelt.

Tim: It’s so true. It’s a whole way to speak to people. When you say authenticity, to be genuinely emotional about something and to defy cynicism with a genuinely emotional experience in a fashion show...that’s a challenge.

Julian: What I saw from Dries—it was a very good lesson—was that, in the end, it’s just a succession of decisions. You try your best. Fifty times a day, you have to call a shot and, in that moment, you take the decision which you think is the right one. There were shows we thought were going to be super emotional and then they weren’t. Shows that we felt maybe less strongly about and everybody was crying. There’s such a margin. Things you cannot plan, things you just don’t have control over. And it’s the same with the success of a product. We never had strategies of how something could be a “hero product”. You just make things as good as you can and then you hope that they land in the best possible way. And sometimes they surpass what you expected, and sometimes they disappoint, but that’s just how it goes.

Tim: What’s the greatest pleasure for you in what you do?

Julian: I think it’s being here with the team, when you see it come together. The first part is quite theoretical, but the middle part when your prints and embroideries come in and it’s not finalised completely yet but the ingredients are there so you get really excited about doing the cooking…

Tim: What’s the greatest pressure?

Julian: I think it’s the last part. It’s always hard when you spend time working on something to really say, now it’s finished and this is what it’s going to be. I think that’s always the scary part. You put so much thought in wanting it to be as good as possible. We start with the showroom beforehand so that’s when you have to stop deciding if it’s longer, shorter, change the buttons, not change the buttons. The night before the show, it’s like, OK, it is what it is. Final decision, that’s the product. And then, after that, there’s putting together the show, editing your looks down and everything goes quite quick and it’s more a feeling of responsibility. And also towards the team. Everybody put in so much work, you just want to be sure that it’s as good as it possibly can be. So that’s why the decisions get a little bit harder towards the end.

Tim: Dries, does that sound familiar? All of that pleasure? All of that pressure?

Dries: Very, very similar. I think, by the way, that’s how we work. As your decisions are taken with your heart in a very spontaneous way, it’s normal that it gets emotional. And so when Julian said the middle part was really fun, it was also the moment when you have certain fabrics that you like and you have an idea, but you don’t know how to visualise it. And then you have a few samples which you put together on the table or on the floor. And then, oh, my goodness, this is right! That’s good. It can quite often be coincidence, but I think coincidence is a very important part in our job. So there’s a piece of fabric left somewhere and you put another roll of fabric with it, and you have to just to keep your eyes open constantly. Because when you think too much, you’re always limited by your knowledge and the way you always did things. Coincidence was always very good. It’s been a big creative input for me.

Tim: The magic of the happy accident.

Dries: Yep, happy accidents. But you have to see that it is good.

Tim: Here’s a question I’ve never been able to ask a designer, for obvious reasons. Julian, when you look at Dries, can you imagine yourself with that many more years of experience and knowledge? What will you be doing, do you think?

Julian: I don’t project that far. It’s been quite a thing for me to come to terms with my situation now. Of course, I’m thinking about Dries when he was my age. How would he think this? But I’m not yet at a stage where I’m thinking, what would I then do when I’m his age? I don’t know what tomorrow’s made of. It’s step by step, season after season. I think it’s really a lot for me to let that all sink in.

Tim: Dries, when you look at Julian, do you see the young you with all that world stretching ahead?

Dries: No, I think the world changed too much. At Julian’s age, I had to build up a company in Belgium which was not really a fashion country and I didn’t know if I ever would succeed in having a house or not. It’s a completely different pressure than what Julian has now because, of course, there’s Puig, there’s the whole machine already behind him.

Julian: It’s just a very different responsibility.

Tim: You don’t wonder at what you’d be able to do now if you had the luxury of your age and experience.

Dries: My knowledge sometimes stopped me from taking certain risks, where Julian in his positive naivety of not knowing certain things maybe wouldn’t stop. When I said I wouldn’t do it, he just said that confirmed the fact that I had to do it. I know that. I don’t want to be like the mother-in-law looking over his shoulder because mother-in-laws are one generation older than the person you’re looking at.

Tim: He has to learn to make his own mistakes.

Dries: The right decisions also. It’s not only mistakes. He has to really push his own vision. That’s why I think Julian’s the right person in the right place, because it would be really sad to have somebody who just respects the past.

Tim: Julian, do you think there are rules that you need to break to crash through all the noise?

Julian: Yeah, I do. But I don’t really see them as being so strict. I think we always benefited here from a certain freedom and I really thank Dries for that. It was always the collections first. Sometimes the team would be very surprised: new season, new system, new way of doing things, new requests. But different collections, different moments require different tools, different ways of doing it. And, for Dries, it was never an obstacle to whether or not we would change things around. We just did.

Dries: You can break some rules, but some rules also make you more creative. When the Antwerp Six were in fashion school, we had a teacher, the famous Mary Prijot, who had such strict rules. We couldn’t make a skirt shorter than the knees because she thought that knees were the ugliest part of a woman. And we were kids in the late 70s, early 80s, punk was happening, and she thought that Chanel was the best designer in the world. And I think the fact that her rules were so strict really pushed us forward to do the most extreme things that we could do in a small framework. And that gave us the power when we started with our own collections and own companies. We had no rules. But we had the limitation that there was no money at all, and we could hide that in the best way because we knew how to function with small rules and in a small frame. We knew we had no money, but we could pretend that this was all on purpose using street casting because it’s nice for real people, even if it was really because we had no money for models. So, rules for me are not all automatically bad. Stupid rules, of course, are broken with a lot of pleasure.

Julian: I’m just realising that total freedom and endless resources are not the best thing for creativity. Dries is absolutely right. Certain limitations and obstacles and restrictions feed creativity. This idea of being put in a box and having to repeat yourself, I never saw that in Dries. It’s not something that I have in my idea of what it means to be a creative director. And especially for now, I think I want to let myself be surprised. You know, I really have no idea what the next collections are going to be like. I just want to take it as it comes and if it feels right, it feels right. That’s just how I’m approaching it.

Tim: Is that how you always worked, Dries?

Dries: For me, I always started with an empty table. A new collection was an empty table. Not like, oh, this sold well, and that sold well. No, when something sold well, we always said, “Oh, then most people have that already in their closet. Let’s do something else.” And afterwards, of course, you knew that you needed certain styles for certain people and things but that came much later in the creative process. The creative process never started with luggage from the previous season.

Tim: One last question: what is beauty now?

Dries: You first, Julian.

Julian: I think it recaps what we were saying: authenticity and emotion.

Dries: It evokes emotion for me, also. So it’s definitely nothing which is attached to rules. The moment there are rules, it’s already boring because then other people can also apply the rules For me, it is something which is quite individual. What’s beauty for me is maybe not beauty for you. And that’s good.

Tim: Thank you.

Tim Blanks’ conversation with Dries Van Noten and Julian Klausner first appeared in Self Service issue 63.