DRIES VAN NOTEN / A commissioned video installation for INSPIRATIONS

Background:

In 2013, I was contacted by Pamela Golbin, curator of the Musée de la Mode et du Textile in Paris, in regard to a new commission: a video installation for a forthcoming exhibition at the museum entitled: Dries Van Noten, Inspirations. Golbin and Van Noten had seen a recent show of mine at the Paris-based Art&Science Center Le Laboratoire, which featured hyper-slow-motion figure studies, and they wondered if I might be open to creating a new and original work that could celebrate his designs — in movement. Several weeks later, I met with Dries and his business partner Patrick Vangheluwe at my New York apartment to talk the idea through. We decided to cast fashion models with movement background as well as dancers from a variety of dance companies including: New York City Ballet, Ohad Naharin, and Martha Graham.  Choreography for the featured subjects would be determined by the qualities of the garment that they were wearing and designed to bring it to life through movement.

From VOGUE

Dries Van Noten's Inspirations: An Inside Look

By Hamish Bowles

The smell of fresh paint and wallpaper glue hung heavy in the air, and installers were tweaking light levels and waiting for last-minute pieces to arrive when Dries Van Noten and Musée de la Mode et du Textile’s stylish curator Pamela Golbin escorted Anna Wintour and me around the moving and magisterial exhibition they have assembled at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, which opens to the public this Saturday.

Entitled simply “Dries Van Noten: Inspirations,” the exhibition is just that—a unique and revelatory exploration of what makes a designer of the caliber of Dries Van Noten tick; the images, movies, artworks (historic and ultramodern), and clothing (antique and ethnic) that inspire, provoke, and stimulate his creativity. Dries was adamant that it is not intended as a retrospective, although it is certainly an opportunity to study his remarkable body of work through the decades, and explore the themes and threads that unite his timeless designs. These include his enduring passions for flowers, India, China, toreadors, dandies, punk, contemporary art, dance, and uniforms among many other themes.

The show opens with clothing from the designers who inspired Dries and his contemporaries when they were students at the fabled Antwerp Royal Academy in the late seventies and the turn of the early eighties, with stellar pieces from the debut collections of Claude Montana, Thierry Mugler, Gianni Versace, Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, and others, presented against a dynamic collaged backdrop of eclectic images of the period that include Klaus Nomi, Sex Pistols, and Divine posters, a John Travolta pin-up, and the Diana Vreeland Interview cover. Dries also recently found, serendipitously, some soft, hippie spirit dresses and an enduringly chic starburst appliqué coat from his time at the Academy.

These clothes are displayed alongside complementary artworks, as though a designer’s inspiration board had come, magically, to life. Schiaparelli’s astonishing 1937 butterfly-printed evening dress, caught beneath a black butterfly net coat, for instance, is juxtaposed with a giant Damien Hirst circular work composed of iridescent butterfly wings (a huge piece that proved a considerable challenge to the movers and installers). A magnificent stormy sea painting by Gerhard Richter, fresh from the Venice Biennale, hangs nearby and is shown with Dries’s own shipwrecked dresses.

The designer’s early Bollywood-inspired collection, meanwhile, is showcased opposite more recent iterations on an Indian theme (latterly referencing maharaja dress) and shown with an ensemble made by Christian Dior for Belgium’s spendthrift fashionista Princess Lilian from Indian textiles that she brought him, and Balenciaga’s early sixties spiraling gown inspired by a sari’s artful drape. A thirties Callot Soeurs dress is displayed with a magnificent Bakst design for a ballet décor (from the museum’s own collection), and an early twenties gown from the same designing trio with Kees van Dongen’s 1925 portrait of his lover, the superbly haughty Madame Jasmy Alvin, evoking Dries’s passion for the East and the rich Indian embroideries. Those masterworks are shown in process in a series of video images of the Indian villagers at their refined work.

The show closes with a video installation by the American visual artist David Michalek. Featuring exquisitely filmed, hyper-slow-motion tableaux, the carefully choreographed motion studies were designed by the artist to show off the tactile qualities of Van Noten’s designs spanning various collections and several decades.