Dries Van Noten: When the Dream Grows Light
That is precisely why Dries Van Noten’s Spring/Summer 2027 menswear collection struck me as one of the strongest ideas of the season. Looking through the runway images and then the lookbook that followed, I realised that Julian Klausner was not seeking a technological answer to the heat. He did not turn to performance fabrics or to the language of sportswear. His proposal was far quieter: to make clothes lighter.
This lightness lay not only in the fineness of the fabrics; it permeated the collection’s entire rhythm. Chiffon, washed silk, fine knits, acetate and viscose that flowed like water did not wrap the body; they accompanied it. Jackets opened as the models walked, parkas moved as though catching the wind, and silk cargo trousers made you almost forget the functional stiffness we have grown used to over the years. The clothes were not carried; they flowed with the body.
Klausner’s starting point is Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem L’Après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun). Yet what truly interests him is less the poem’s story than the state of feeling it creates. Regarded as one of the most important texts of 19th-century French Symbolism, the work does not build a plot in the classical sense. Reality and reverie, desire and memory, waking and dreaming constantly blur into one another.
A faun, half man and half goat, wakes from a brief sleep in the forest, unsure whether the nymphs he encountered ever truly existed. Perhaps what he saw is a memory; perhaps a dream that has not yet faded. Mallarmé never answers the question. And that is exactly where the poem’s magic begins.
Mallarmé’s poem resonated powerfully not only in literary history, but across other art forms. Inspired by the poem, Claude Debussy composed his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune in 1894. Some twenty years later, Vaslav Nijinsky, with the choreography he created to the same music for the Ballets Russes, marked one of the turning points in the history of modern dance. Julian Klausner, in turn, carries the state of feeling created by the same poem into the language of fashion, this time through fabrics, colours and silhouettes.
And yet this is not an adaptation. Klausner does not retell the poem; he rebuilds its atmosphere within today’s menswear wardrobe. The lightness of the fabrics, the sun-faded colours, the semi-sheer layers and the patterns evoking nature are not mere aesthetic choices; they become tools that make the poem’s elusive spirit visible. The collection tells no particular story. Just like Mallarmé’s poem, it does not explain its meaning; it slowly leaves it with you.
We feel this most of all in the colours. Pale peach tones, powdery pinks, mist blues, moss greens, earthy browns and oranges recalling the sunset… The palette evokes less an imitation of nature than a long day spent within it. On some denim pieces, bleaching dispersed like clouds, tree prints on jackets and patterns resembling the sky do not merely decorate nature; they turn it into one of the collection’s invisible characters.
As the collection went on, something else caught my attention. Julian Klausner is not really designing new clothes; he is rearranging the habits of the male wardrobe. The suit is still a suit, the parka still a parka, the cargo trousers still cargo trousers. None of them loses its identity. But each takes on a different character. Shoulders have softened, volumes have lightened, fabrics have lost their stiffness. The language of the male wardrobe is changing, but it does not announce this loudly.
This transformation is most evident in the details borrowed from the women’s wardrobe. Sheer shirts, ribbed tank tops, ties recalling thin straps, lace embroidery and open-backed silhouettes look bold at first glance. But the collection does not use them for provocation; it does not transform the male body, it gives it a new sensitivity. The garment neither hides the body nor exposes it. It narrows the distance between fabric and skin. Sensuality here is sought not in openness, but in closeness.
The most striking thing about the collection is not femininity, but softness. For many years, menswear was defined through structure, strength and control. Klausner sets another value against this. Being soft can also be strong. Being light can also be assertive. Dropping a jacket’s shoulder slightly, cutting a parka from silk, or rethinking cargo trousers in a fluid fabric… Sometimes the most radical changes are the quietest.
Looking back at the history of Dries Van Noten, nature, colour and pattern have always formed the house’s core language. Julian Klausner preserves this legacy but gives it a new rhythm. Nature is now felt not only in floral prints, but in the movement of the fabrics, the paleness of the colours and the way the silhouettes breathe. Wind, water and light become the collection’s invisible materials.
At the end of the poem, the faun cannot decide whether what he saw was real or a dream. Perhaps he does not need to decide.
Julian Klausner’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection for Dries Van Noten likewise chooses to live in that same uncertainty. The colours hang suspended between daylight and night. The fabrics, between skin and wind. And the male wardrobe stands right at the edge of the definitions we are used to.
When the collection ends, no definitive answer remains. Only a body grown lighter, a time slowed down, and that silence which settles on you as though you had walked through a forest. Some dreams scatter the moment you wake. Others walk with you all day. This collection by Julian Klausner for Dries Van Noten is one of them.