Dries Van Noten put together an essay on what he called “the elegance of the unexpected” for his fall men’s show. In many ways it read as another chapter of the “familiar-unfamiliar, unfamiliar-familiar” theme he talked about at his last women’s show. He started and ended with elongated, black tailored coats in silhouettes that made every model seem improbably tall. They were also wearing black, almost slipper-like leather shoes. Which gave us unexpected styling point number one: they weren’t trainers. Are formal shoes really making a comeback after so many years?
Such small things herald big shifts in men’s fashion. Van Noten also set about disrupting the aesthetics of classic tailoring, adding ‘rustic’ (his word) shaggy scarves to lean suits or coats, pairing them with leather t-shirts, throwing in knitted arm-warmers or putting one sleeve into a sweater, and draping the rest of it around the other shoulder.
Then there were the unexpected marriages between textiles and generic garment templates. Cargo pants (also a ubiquitous trend) turned up in suiting fabric and as the lower half of a velvet evening suit. Later on—when the collection hit a more casual passage—the pattern for a pair of wide-legged
pleated trousers was rendered in a track pant jersey. Actually, the drapey effect looked kind of great.
Sometimes, though, Dries is at his much loved and relied-on best when he just makes a coat a classic coat. The shawl-collared, one-button tuxedo at the end of the collection was one such impeccable, timeless piece. In a season when mountains of long dark coats are being shown, it still stood out as one of the best in class. Sometimes, the elegance of the expected is precisely what we need.