Dries Van Noten and Rabanne

Two brands within the Puig Group of fashion houses – Dries Van Noten and Rabanne – staged consecutive shows, one a cautious step into the post-Dries era, the other a dynamic celebration of contemporary flash fashion.
 

Dries Van Noten Bis

Close but no cigar at Dries Van Noten, in the first show by the house since the designer’s departure in June.
A perfectly adequate collection that looked like Drives Van Noten, except pitched a couple of notes lower. A Spring/Summer 2025 that had plenty of Van Noten’s DNA – ethnic prints, disheveled beading, eye-popping color and a dash of street chic. But very little of Dries’ magic.

The opening looks ranged from a faux-snakeskin trench and sheath, the latter with a red coral neckline; to blotch paisley handkerchief skirts paired with skimpy bras and baseball jackets. On to café crème or turquoise negligées and beautiful seashell print silk wrap dresses.
 
Even if there were some great mashed up zebra print spy trenches; and several impeccably cut mannish tailor coats that major fans of Dries will snap up, this was very much a hit and miss affair. Too muddy the prints, to jarring the combos, too obvious the silhouette.

And, the less said about hair makeup the better. Waxed backed ringlets looked done by a girl too much in a rush not to be late for a date; while the red eyeliner made you think the cast all had conjunctivitis.
 
Officially, the collection was created by Dries’ old design team, who took a collective bow, amid a good deal of cheering. However, by that stage, scores of buyers and editors had already began descending the dusty building sites stairway.
 
At the finale, a live Instagram feed captured Dries and his husband Patrick Vangheluwe looking quite frankly bored. All told, not a bad first bat for whoever oversees the Dries Van Noten design team today. In sporting parlance, they got to first base, but were a long way from a homerun.
 
As we said, close but no cigar.
 

Rabanne: Catwalk Miss Kittens 

From a wrecked old building in the 9th to the Palais de Tokyo in the 16th for the Space Age aesthetic of Rabanne. Which is alive and well at the storied Paris house, after a metallic mode collection from designer Julien Dossena.

 
Dossena sent out so many metallics, at one stage scraps of gold leaf covered the runway after a model turned around at the photographers’ pit. Blessed with a highly distinctive style, Dossena has definitely make Rabanne look far more contemporary while still respecting its funky futurist DNA: with chainmail cocktails, metallic frocks mixed with tough chic parkas.
 
His opening look said it all: supermodel Gigi Hadid in a stripes-on-stripes blend: shorts, a striped shirt and a parka made of techy men’s shirting material. 
 
He cut huge-shouldered jackets but nipped them with western style side studs; and combined that idea with silver centurion’s skirts and even hooded sweatshirts.  His hipster warrior clubbers appeared in Art Deco silver crystal tops worn with chiffon harem pants, and galactic goddesses marched by in turquoise pleated negligées overlaid with silver. 
 
Anchoring everything with see-through plastic booties or soft Flash Gordon boots, like those worn by the Asian beauty in a naughty Princess Leia gold chainmail gown with cut-out sides. Talk about a head turner.
 
With the retirement of Dries Van Noten, Dossena is now the most critically acclaimed of designers in the Puig Group, which also controls Jean-Paul Gaultier, Carolina Herrera and Nina Ricci. Jean-Paul, like Dries, has departed the runways; Wes Gordon at Herrera creates respectful classical uptown modernism, while Harris Reed at Ricci has been a flop.
 
So, by default, Dossena is the designer of reference and Puig, adding greater weight to today’s show inside the Palais de Tokyo. More power to him that this was a bona fide hit.