Exclusive: Watch Dries Van Noten Discuss His Swan Song Show

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Dries Van Noten Final Show Film
(Film still)

In an exclusive first look, AnOther presents a new short film by Lisa Immordino Vreeland capturing the final moments leading up to Dries Van Noten’s farewell show

The silver leaf has long settled on Dries Van Noten’s exit from his namesake label – a controlled and considered move by the Belgian designer that took everyone by surprise in March of last year. His final show followed that June: his 129th runway presentation and the 150th collection of a remarkable 38-year career, and a true grand finale.

Van Noten has always been something of an outlier in fashion. A member of the legendary Antwerp Six – the collective of Belgian designers who emerged from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s and disrupted the prevailing norms of Parisian fashion – he built his brand not on spectacle, but on substance. From the beginning, Van Noten forged a distinct path without the need for celebrity or advertising campaigns. What he offered instead was rigour and emotion, collections that explored global references, textures, and colour with painterly precision.

AnOther can now exclusively reveal a new short film by Lisa Immordino Vreeland – the acclaimed director of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel (2011) and Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (2015) – which captures the charged final moments before that last show.

“I thought about how Marcelo Mastroianni once spoke of a paradoxical nostalgia del futuro, beyond the lost paradises imagined by Proust, and how we continue to pursue our dreams knowing that, at some point, we can look back on them with love,” Van Noten tells us now of his swan song show. “I love my job; I love doing fashion shows and sharing fashion with people. Creating is about leaving something that lives on. My sense of this moment is how it is not only mine, but ours, always.”

In four minutes, the film traces the quiet intensity backstage as Van Noten prepares for his grand finale. Over voiceover, he reflects on storytelling through clothes, the intimacy of beauty, and what it means to hand over a legacy. “It’s not that I get bored with certain things,” the designer shares candidly, “I’m just hungry for new emotions to discover the next new beauty.”

For his final show, Van Noten brought back models from past collections, casting across generations to signal continuity rather than nostalgia. “It’s really kind of family,” he says in the documentary, not sentimentally, but as a way of working and thinking. Julian Klausner, who had been the womenswear designer at Dries Van Noten since August 2018, succeeded the designer to the helm of the label – a quiet passing of the baton that came to came to fruition in March this year for Autumn/Winter 2025.