Inspirations of a creator: Dries Van Noten on his MoMu exhibition

Summary

Following a hugely successful run in Paris, the prolific Antwerp designer Dries Van Noten shares his inspiration in a new exhibition at MoMu. He talks to Flanders Today about how his love of culture in all its forms has informed his work and this new show

Fashion with an edge

In its latest exhibition, Antwerp fashion museum MoMu focuses on one of the city’s best-loved designers. But don’t think of the show as a retrospective. Instead of celebrating an already prolific career, Dries Van Noten decided to delve head-first into his own imagination and reveal the inspirations behind his work.

A month after opening, Dries Van Noten: Inspirations has had 20,000 visitors. It’s an overwhelming success, according to MoMu director Kaat Debo, but hardly a surprise.

The exhibition premiered last year at Les Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where it attracted a staggering 160,000 people. The key to this popularity is likely to be found in the original combination of fashion and art. Rather than zooming in purely on Van Noten’s designs, the exhibition shows the links between his work and the paintings, statues, music, movies and dresses that inspire it.

Van Noten is a lover of culture in all its manifestations, from Flemish Primitives to punk rock, and he’s quite the collector. For Dries Van Noten, he looked to museum archives as well as personal acquisitions. A visit to the museum thus becomes an invitation to discover his creative process as well as a journey through the universe of the fashion house.

Was designing an exhibition about your work a dream come true?
For me, it wasn’t really a dream because I never thought it possible. But four years ago, Pamela Golbin, the chief curator of Les Arts Décoratifs, contacted me to talk about the possibility of working together.

At first, the idea was to do a confrontation between the archives of Les Arts Décoratifs and pieces from my collection. We also mused on doing a retrospective exhibition, but I didn’t feel ready. For me, a retrospective rounds off a certain period in one’s life and heralds the start of something new. I’m not there yet; it’s too early. So we circled back to a confrontation, to arrive finally at the concept of inspiration.

Hypothetical inspiration

How did you decide which sources of inspiration to include?
I didn’t want people to think I only draw inspiration from beautiful dresses by Balenciaga or Dior, because there is so much more. That’s how we came up with the idea to mix fashion with art, with music, with movies – all these influences that are the real inspirations behind my collections. 

I didn’t say to myself: “Those are my best collections, and we’re not going to talk about the rest”

- Dries Van Noten

We started by going through the archives of Les Arts Décoratifs, which are truly incredible. Taking garments alone, they have 150,000 pieces, from shoes and accessories to fabrics. There are a lot of similarly great museums in the world, so I thought about my most important collections and started making combinations.

Inspiration shouldn’t only be understood in the literal sense. Sometimes I made post hoc associations. My Butterfly collection, for example, was created in 1999 and is shown with a work by Damien Hirst that only dates back to 2011. The inspiration in the name of the exhibition is hypothetical; it illustrates the way I think.

The exhibition in Antwerp is not identical to last year’s in Paris. What are the most significant differences?
The two last Spring/Summer collections, in particular the women’s collection. The latter was inspired by Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and takes up the last room of the exhibition [in Antwerp]. The silhouettes are flanked by a Giuseppe Penone sculpture, a Ryan McGinley print and a small film of John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia.

The combination of these works perfectly shows where we started when designing the collection: There is the conceptual idea of the Penone, the youth of the McGinley and the ethereal beauty of the Ophelia painting. I am really happy with this combination.

Some alterations were made out of purely practical concerns. We thought it would be fantastic to show my Francis Bacon collection in Antwerp as well. In Paris, we had a Bacon painting to accompany it, but here we couldn’t find one. So we dropped that part of the exhibition and went with pieces inspired by the Flemish Masters instead.

So there are a lot of reasons for including or excluding a piece. I didn’t say to myself: “Those are my best collections, and we’re not going to talk about the rest.”

General rebelliousness

The works of Shakespeare and Francis Bacon provided direct inspiration for two of your collections. Is that how it always works, or can inspiration also work in more subtle ways?
There isn’t really a system. Systems kill creativity. “One plus one equals two” is a sum everyone can arrive at. For me, inspiration works in all directions. Sometimes the process is straightforward. The collection The Piano was clearly inspired by a certain part of the movie of the same name, in which the protagonist almost drowns at sea. This scene was the incentive to explore what clothes look like when they’re wet and then translate that into my collection, with the darkness of the sea and the dramatic ending of the movie.

Systems kill creativity. For me, inspiration works in all directions

- Dries Van Noten

In other instances, I start with a single idea or combine different elements. The Punk collection, for example, is based on a general rebelliousness, but without the safety pins, and mixed with the revolutionary aesthetic of Dior in the 1940s and ’50s. We show pieces from the collection next to a video of Yves Klein asking women to paint their bodies blue and pressing them against a blank canvas, which also constitutes a rebellious process of creating art.

You’re inspired by great artists past and present but also use pop music as a soundtrack to your catwalk shows. Do you make a distinction between high and low art?
For me, there is no high and low art. I can play around with different things without dismissing them as cheap or commercial. There are so many things that can inspire me, from the really beautiful to the ugly. When something is too beautiful, it gets boring. You need an edge.

Do you also look at what women wear every day?
Not really; I try to stay one step ahead. So I look at street photography, but without dwelling too much on the past and present. As a designer, I try to look towards the future. 

The exhibition also includes work by other designers. Who inspired you as a young designer?
Growing up in the late 1970s, early ’80s, I looked up to Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier. They were our heroes because not only did they create great fashion, they invented a completely new concept. It was a time when prêt-à-porter became more important than haute couture. The Italians began to have an impact: Versace, Armani... and these designers became accessible to a larger audience. Prêt-à-porter was more affordable and more modern than couture. Finally, fashion reached young people.

With the exhibition, you also inspire others with your work. Are you aware of this?
Of course! It’s always nice when young designers tell me they look up to me and see my work as proof that it’s possible to create fashion in a different, more personal way. I always enjoy talking to the new generation. And, as I inspire them, they inspire me.

Dries Van Noten: Inspirations runs until 19 July at MoMu, Nationalestraat 28, Antwerp

Photo by Boy Kortekaas

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Antwerp Six

The Antwerp Six are a handful of pioneering Flemish designers credited with putting both the city’s Royal Academy fashion department and Belgian fashion in general on the map. In the 1980s, their group show in London took the fashion world by storm.
Names - The Antwerp Six are Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Walter Van Beirendonck and Marina Yee.
Moniker - Because British journalists covering London Fashion Week struggled with their names, they dubbed the designers the “Antwerp Six”.
Plus one - Martin Margiela, who graduated from the fashion school a few years before the Six, is often mistakenly included in the Antwerp Six.
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Academy’s fashion department is founded

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group show in London

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beginning of second wave of Antwerp fashion

  • Flanders Fashion Institute
  • Academy’s Fashion Department
  • London Fashion Week