Fashion has a reputation for being cyclical. A designer debuts with fire and intensity, leads the avant garde briefly, settles into a comfort zone, then fades away, only to be revived as retro, if they're fortunate. So Dries Van Noten is an anomaly. Van Noten and five fellow Belgian designers stormed the salon in the late 1980s, showing their wares out of a van in London, but he has been growing and maturing for years. His quiet, artful and accessible aesthetic has grown in popularity since his first collection, enough that after two decades designing, he won the CFDA International Award in 2008. His collections don't often change direction radically from season to season, rather they shift slowly in nuance and texture. Over the last few seasons his men's designs have been fresh and modern to the extent that it's easy to forget that Van Noten got his formal design education in the 1970s.
Van Noten is now known for both women's and men's clothing, but he got his start with men's. Today, Van Noten's menswear is smart, carefully considered, and mature. He uses traditional, even folkish, printing and manufacturing techniques to make refined, innovative pieces. His clothing is global in scope and local in its appropriations, but not arts-and-crafts-style or provincial. His clothes often focus on themselves rather than on extending a collection-wide metaphor, and he has earned a reputation as a thinking man's designer.
For fall 2011/2012, Mr. van Noten maintains his rep for top-quality tailoring, adding some volume and typically subtle color (a rich, near-cobalt blue) to his repertoire. Knit sweaters envelop the upper body in wool, and some outerwear is decorated with double lapels, sometimes in fur. It’s a reserved and sophisticated collection, as van Noten fans have come to expect, but with touches of luxury everywhere. On the Kenley jacket, van Noten has also broadened his standard jacket lapels and bulked up his shoulders just a bit--in the glacial progress of the lounge suit, the change can almost be called bold.