By Seth Khouri
It has almost become a hallmark for recently appointed designers to revisit the halls of the past. For Julian Klausner, the creative director behind Dries Van Noten, this season provided a gander down memory lane, where he transported his audience to Lycèe Carnot, the staging ground of the label’s 2009 offering. Rooted in nostalgia, Klausner connected each of his audience members to a single, quietly universal thread—the uneasy nostalgia of youth. “The bell rang and hundreds of teenagers came pouring in, and it struck me how universal and how intergenerational the feeling is: a kind of awkwardness and a slight cringe, also a certain joy,” he shared when recalling his visit to the high school after his last womenswear outing.
This approach alone allows the viewer (prior to one’s first glance) to discover a plethora of theories of execution from Klausner. The premise invites reflection: how important is clothing within the process of self-discovery? In adolescence, dress becomes both armour and experiment, a language through which identity is rehearsed and rewritten. Yet, as one may expect with Klausner, the art of subversion remains prominent—never allowing the audience to settle into certainty before the tide inevitably shifts once again.
The sixty-one-look collection opened with the hallmarks of a school uniform (not unlike his menswear offering circa June 2025): a shirt-and-tie, a preppy blazer, and tailored trousers led the way, capturing the disciplined familiarity of the Lycèe Carnot schoolyard. Yet the order was subverted almost immediately. Thick jacquards, plaid puffer jackets, deconstructed denim, and sharply structured overcoats disrupted any sense of cohesion, as if the rules of dress had been rewritten between classes. Elsewhere, varsity jackets, pixelated prints, 17th-century still lifes, and South-East Asian–inspired coats upheld the chaos—each look feeling less like a uniform and more like a teenager’s bedroom wall, layered with references, obsessions, and contradictions.
The colour pairings remained wonderful as always. Vibrant reds and yellows sat alongside denim blues and floral-printed jacquards, creating a palette that felt instinctive rather than overly resolved. In the likeness of his predecessor, Dries Van Noten himself, Klausner upkeeps the label’s intrinsic codes surrounding the joy found in chaos. Floral blazers with elasticated collars sat open, revealing flashes of skin beneath, varsity jackets were tugged and cinched from the inside out, and jacquard coats were emulsified with cable-knit sleeves, each gesture disrupting the expected silhouette just enough to feel intentional rather than unruly.
For Klausner, many of his outings only fully reveal themselves in completion, with critique surrounding wearability growing louder each season. Yet perhaps that is precisely the point. In a climate increasingly dictated by commercial logic, Klausner continues to find joy in the simple act of dressing, disregarding the constant plea for practicality in favour of self-expression. In doing so, he remains—at his core—a youthful school student, still enamoured with the endless, chaotic wonders of fashion.
