Wild, wild, boys, boys: Klausner’s first collection at Dries Van Noten

About six months after Dries Van Noten stepped back from running his namesake label, Julian Klausner has picked up from his well-established churchmanship of print, colour, and a sense of historicism with around a dozen Fall looks, each presented on mannequins and accompanied by images shot by fellow Belgian, Willy Vanderperre.
The house of Dries Van Noten explained that the collection was an impression or adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ novel The Wild Boys, first published in 1971. Burroughs’ Wild Boys are a queer youth movement, a sort of action group, who operate in the setting of a post-apocalyptic 20th century. The style of this group, and the descriptions offered, are said to have informed David Bowie’s alien avatar Ziggy Stardust—a self-created entity that was exhausted by its own fame and excess.
Vandeperre’s campaign photographs are moody, capturing this mixture of drama tinged with apostasy and abjection. The garments that clothed Klausner's fictional characters referenced a mixture of time periods and historic dress. While it might appear to have footnotes of John Galliano, and Galliano at Maison Margiela (the mud-larking 'ship of fools’ of Spring/Summer 2022), on further inspection, it remains close to the mark of Van Noten. The departed creative director is there in emblematic flowers—whether as a buttonhole attached to a ribbon and tied at the throat, an all-over repeat print, or a print placement with the edge of petals picked out in embroidery.
There are also the military-style gabardine and barathea wools that are a mainstay of most Van Noten winter collections, and trousers generally had a fuller leg with pleats at the waist. One style had a folded-over detail at the waist and buttoned on the side; this had previously been produced in cotton canvas. But the story here was, however, more about the sleeves. There were generally large leg-o-mutton sleeves, and one coat had a puffed sleeve jutting off an exaggerated dropped shoulder. Most of the outerwear and jackets were in black, and some had swank flocked linings, with two styles featuring a Victorian-style knee-length frock coat to the front and a fuller back—one was in soot, the other in sanguine brown that had a texture that looked like liquidy astrakhan. An envelope-slit neck top recalled a fisherman’s smock, as did the wader-style boots, which were styled with most looks, along with derbies with an elongated toe.
Shirting and garments worn beneath the tailored options were made from poplins, which were also used as styling elements, including babushka scarves or pussybows tied or unfurling from the neck. Recalling the opening of Dries Van Noten’s Spring 2020 collection—a collaboration with Christian Lacroix—and its single ostrich plume, other accessories included feathers that sprayed from inside the revere of a jacket like the breast of a black swan, while thin tie belts in scarlet red added a colour element to the looks.
Klausner took a cast of familiar characters in the Van Noten canon—the sailor, the infantryman, the dandy—and furnished a world that drew on the 19th and 20th centuries. Adding to this vignette is Vanderperre’s sunless, gloomy imagery, the worn armchairs, life rings, rowboats, and models, who we could imagine walking on the shores of a new world. All the looks, whether in situ or in a built mise-en-scène, were presented without feeling mired in historic costume. Where there was once an epilogue, now there is a prologue; a similar style but in a new hand.
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