Belgian fashion house Dries Van Noten has unveiled its first monumental chapter with Julian Klausner, the 33-year-old Antwerp designer who was passed the baton as the new Creative Director six months after Dries Van Noten had shaken the world of fashion when he decided to retire in June of 2024. Klausner had worked alongside Van Noten himself since 2018, making it an unconventional intimate succession rather than a pivotal move for relevance. 

This seamless transition and trust in direction to honor Van Noten’s work while pushing the vision forward is evident in Klausner’s choice of venue–straying from the precedented signature runways that had taken place in raw, industrialized spaces. Instead, his vision trickled down the elegant marbled floors of the historic Palais Garnier, a decadent masterpiece of 19th-century architecture in Paris that blends Neo-Baroque and Neo-Renaissance styles, with a total of 56 looks honoring Van Noten’s language: pigment and pattern. 

“Throwing things together, feeling the textures and sensations that wearing clothes can ignite,” Klausner notes about his collection as a precarious memory of him as a child who had fallen in love with clothes through his family’s costume box. “A tight belt, a heavy coat, or a scarf wrapped a certain way could create a character crafted with affection, letting my imagination run wild.”

The collection, presented to an intimate crowd of Paris Fashion Week attendees, is an elegant reminder of timelessness, craftsmanship, and a clear tribute to the lavish and opulent décor elements from the opera: enlarged cuffs and collars, robust silhouettes, heavy tapestry-like materials, curtain tassels and soft white fringes posed as rich embellishments. 

“The collection was created with the venue in mind,” Klausner wrote in his show notes. “Here, I imagined women passing through the opera, grabbing fabrics and objects, tying them with a shoelace while on a quest to find the answer to an unknown question. Behind the curtain, where creation and practice happen.”

The dramatic gestures of the looks, the smudged eyes, the makeup scarf tied around the head–forming eccentricity around these women passing through the space accompanied by a composition transitioning from an orchestra to a haunting overlay of instruments and operatic voices, making it the final binding element of Julian Klausner’s Dries Van Noten.