On 19 March 2024, Dries Van Noten told the fashion industry he was finished. Not ill, not pushed, and not bought out of his own name: the menswear show scheduled for that June in Paris, his spring summer 2025 collection, would be his last. In an industry that treats a founder's departure as a crisis to be managed, the Antwerp designer simply published a date and kept it.
He was the trade's third generation. His grandfather was a tailor and his father kept a menswear shop, and Van Noten graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1981. In 1986 he travelled to London with five classmates to show a first menswear collection. The group, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee among them, entered fashion history as the Antwerp Six. Barneys New York and Whistles in London placed orders.
Womenswear was added within a year. In 1989 the house opened its first store, Het Modepaleis, in a former menswear store in Antwerp, and the company has been run from that city ever since. Paris came on schedule: a menswear debut in 1991, a first womenswear show in 1993, and two collections a year for each line from then on. There was no advertising and there were no pre-collections. There were prints, developed season after season with embroiderers in India, and colour combinations that should not have worked and did.
The method produced its own theatre. The 50th show, in 2004, seated 500 guests at one long table that afterwards became the catwalk. In 2014 the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris mounted Inspirations, the first exhibition devoted to a Belgian designer in that museum's history; it later travelled to the MoMu in Antwerp. The honours accumulated in parallel: International Designer of the Year from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2008, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2015, and a barony from the King of Belgium in 2017.
The private engine of the work sits outside the city, at Ringenhof near Lier, where Van Noten and his partner Patrick Vangheluwe, who joined the company in 1987, keep a house set in a park of some fifty five acres laid out with the landscape architect Erik Dhont. The floral prints that became the house signature are a gardener's prints, drawn from a garden that is worked rather than merely owned.
Nothing in the work chased the decade's silhouette. While minimalism ruled the nineties, Van Noten kept layering printed, embroidered and brightly coloured clothes, cut to be worn rather than to be photographed, and the industry's taste eventually rotated back towards him. The New York Times described him in 2005 as one of fashion's most cerebral designers; in 2008 he dressed Cate Blanchett for the Academy Awards.
Independence lasted until 14 June 2018, when the Spanish fashion and beauty group Puig took a majority stake in the company. Van Noten kept a minority shareholding and stayed on as creative director, and a beauty line followed in 2022. The arrangement gave the house a larger balance sheet and changed nothing visible: same city, same schedule, same refusal to advertise.
The March 2024 announcement set the terms plainly: he would leave after the June menswear show, to make room for a new generation of talent. The final show was his 129th on a catwalk and his 150th collection, and his Antwerp Six contemporaries sat in the audience. The womenswear collection that followed in September 2024 was designed by his studio, with Van Noten watching from a seat near the back.
The successor was announced on 9 December 2024, and he was already in the building. Julian Klausner, then 33, had joined the house in 2018 and risen to head its womenswear studio, designing alongside Van Noten for six years. A graduate of La Cambre in Brussels, with earlier experience at Maison Margiela, he was the inside candidate, and the founder endorsed the choice in the announcement itself, saying he had complete confidence in Klausner's creativity and vision.
His first menswear arrived as a look book in January 2025. The runway debut came on 5 March 2025, a womenswear show staged at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, and his first full menswear show followed that June. The calendar has held since. The autumn 2026 womenswear show returned to the Lycée Carnot in Paris, a school the house had first used in 2009, and the spring 2027 collection was shown in Paris on 30 September 2026.
Van Noten remains a minority shareholder, and Puig has reported double digit growth across its niche brands, this house among them. Two years after the farewell, the succession reads less like a rescue than like the last collection he designed: planned early, executed calmly, and finished exactly when he said it would be.
