Dries Van Noten: Growing Up in Clothes
In his second collection for men, Julian Klausner describes a threshold rather than a firm stance.
When I walked in, my first feeling was this: this collection does not want to tell, it wants to remind. Not of an era, but of a state. Neither childhood nor adulthood, but that strange, slightly defenceless space between the two. It was as if the clothes had not yet decided: do they belong on me, or are they only entrusted to me?
As a vintage collector, the clothes I have gathered and worn have always been part of my own process of growing up and maturing, because every piece from the past felt less like a burden I carried than like a guide as I built the person I am today. This is why the story behind the collection felt so familiar. The coming of age Klausner describes as “that fragile moment between being young and passing into adulthood” matched the story of a young man leaving home and packing the things he loves into his suitcase — hand-me-downs, his grandfather’s coat, the jacket from his childhood. Here, clothes ceased to be objects of style and became carried memories, the silent companions of an identity not yet complete.
In his second collection for men, Julian Klausner describes a threshold rather than a firm stance: that fragile moment between leaving home and stepping out into the world. The clothes here exist not for identities that have reached a conclusion, but for bodies still learning, experimenting and finding their way — with a quiet yet poetic sense of passage, in which memories and the future are carried at once. Some pieces look borrowed. Not the grandfather’s coat, perhaps, but they carry its scent. Not the childhood jacket, but its shyness. Masculinity here is not a powerful pose but a language being learned. Sometimes mispronounced, sometimes understood in silence.
The coats are clear but not definitive. The knits are orderly, yet hardly obedient. Patterns layer on top of one another: florals, geometric lines, knit… But it never feels excessive. On the contrary, it is like the inside of the mind: that scattered clarity that emerges when you are thinking of many things at once. This is what I loved most about the collection — a controlled indecision. The silence of the re-see suited this collection beautifully. There was no applause, no music; eyes were more attentive. No distance remained between the clothes and me. I saw the seams, felt the weight, noticed that some pieces did not want to sit on the shoulder — and that was deeply human.
This collection is not interested in giving answers; rather, it leaves the right questions open. Instead of defining masculinity, it shows it in motion — sometimes inside a coat that is a size too big, sometimes in the weight of a layer not yet familiar. What remained after the re-see was not the images of a season, but a feeling that will widen with time. While growing up, while setting out, just before deciding. As I left, the rain picked up a little. Paris was still grey, but the morning was no longer quite morning. This collection made me think: some clothes do not propose a style; they keep you company. In the moments of life when you have not yet decided, when you are in a state of “not yet”. And perhaps the best designs are precisely those that know how to carry this feeling of “not yet”.