Waking up in the middle of this heatwave feels like a haze. Our senses are confused, reality seems altered, and it all looks blurry. Julian Klausner seemed to predict this particular scenario many months ago when coming up with the concept for his Dries Van Noten S/S 2027 collection, taking a poem about a faun waking up in a warm, misty forest and having dreamlike encounters with nymphs as inspiration. The faun wakes up among the foliage, and his state is similar to ours right now, unable to distinguish what's real from what's not. The nymphs bring him relief and excitement, a sort of oasis that at times seems too perfect to be real. The models carrying the looks presented yesterday by the Belgian brand instantly became our nymphs: a perfect, real and magical escape.
“Did I love a dream?” reads the poem L'Après-midi d’un Faune (A Faun's Afternoon) by Stéphane Mallarmé, key to the new collection. Loving a dream is what feels like loving Julian Klausner's era at Dries. Without a single miss ever since his debut as creative director of a brand he has been long working for and that understands probably better than most, the delicate language required to perpetuate what Dries started is spoken by Julian with fluency, and this latest collection feels as if he’s presenting a soft narrative look by look. From waking up with the warm sun to the dusk arriving with its surreal colours, what was inspired by a poem became, in sixty-one looks, a poem itself.
A faun waking up in the hazy forest and encountering nymphs that are not clear if they are real or imaginary contains several concepts that Julian found ideal to keep constructing the menswear universe he imagines for the brand. It's mystical, introspective, erotic, ethereal, and mythological. All these adjectives can describe equally well the garments and the verses of the poem. With a standout colour palette that shouldn't be a surprise coming from the brand that has historically handled colour and prints the best but somehow keeps surpassing themselves each and every time, the progressively darkened collection contains, between the nude tones of the beginning and the sombre shades of the end, a whole landscape of colours. The sky, the nature, the elements. All have been translated into pigments.
Not by chance, this chromatic transition signifies the afternoon of the faun: the warmth of the day and the harshness of the night, from the intimate start of his awake journey, where lingerie-inspired pieces sensually dress the body, to the protection-seeking end, with black outerwear providing a sense of security. Across all the looks that seemed to accompany the transition from day to night and equally seemed to go from lighter fabrics to sturdier ones, the common thread was how flowy everything was. No matter the type of garments, the colour they have or the function they hold, all pieces seem to float over the body. A trench coat seems as easy to carry as a transparent tank top. The layering adds depth but not weight, and the prints, no matter if geometric, floral, or simply chromatic, have the dreamlike properties of an oasis in the middle of the desert. A blurry fading illusion.
“No, but this numb body and this vacant soul succumb to the spell of the afternoon," states the faun in the last verse of the poem, and we too succumb to a spell, the one cast by Julian this season. A collection that, just by seeing it, alleviates our suffering from this heat, provides our minds a nice place to rest and gives fashion more and more hopes of great stories that are yet to be told.
