The bell was the point. Julian Klausner emptied a Paris high school for a winter morning and set his second Dries Van Noten menswear show in its corridors. The clothes were about being sixteen.
Klausner took over a house one man built across nearly forty years. Dries Van Noten showed his final collection in June 2024 and stepped away from the label that carries his name. The studio he assembled stayed. Klausner had worked inside it for years before the house named him to lead it.
His brief was narrow and hard. Keep the prints, the colour, the layering the house was known for. Do it without the founder in the room. Four seasons in, Dries Van Noten still reads as itself.
The school
The Fall 2026 menswear show ran at the Lycée Carnot, a Paris school closed for the midwinter break. Klausner had visited months earlier and watched the halls flood when the bell rang. He built the collection around that scene, teenagers working out who they are through what they put on. He called it When Dawn Breaks.
The clothes carried the idea plainly. Oversize baseball jackets with gold crests. Uniform blazers with broad shoulders, cinched waists and contrast piping. Colourful sweaters and vest tops, some finished with rough-edged wool scarves. Behind them sat Klausner's wider references, the multicultural Antwerp of the sixteenth century and Flemish still lifes of fruit and birds.
Reviewers gave it high marks. The disparate threads held together, school uniform and old painting and city history braided into one line of clothes. It was a young collection about being young, made by a designer still early in his own tenure.
The handover
The house belongs to Puig, the Spanish group that has held it since 2018. Dries Van Noten stayed independent longer than most of its peers. The founder sold, designed on for several more years, then stopped. Succession at a house named for a living person is rarely clean.
This one has been quieter than expected. Klausner did not arrive to reinvent. He arrived to continue, which is the harder assignment and the one the house needed. He inherited a customer who buys to keep, not to flip, and he has designed for her and him without breaking the contract.
Four seasons
His womenswear debut came in March 2025 at the Opéra Garnier. He worked the theme of costume, with 1930s tailoring in sloped shoulders, draped devoré gowns and Art Deco lines. The room read a designer who knew the archive and was not afraid to stand next to it.
For Spring 2026 he loosened. He described the mood as ease and optimism, drawn from long days at the beach. Ruffled jersey dresses followed bomber jackets. Poplin tops and sheer gowns moved through a lighter palette. The Fall 2026 womenswear that came after turned on nostalgia, a wardrobe of feelings rather than a single silhouette.
The through line is method. Klausner builds a collection from a place and a feeling, then lets the tailoring and the prints carry it. He alternates men's and women's across the calendar and keeps the two in conversation. A crest on a schoolboy jacket in January answers a foulard motif on a gown from the season before.
A house named for a man who has left is a hard thing to keep honest. Klausner has kept it honest.
The Splendid EditAntwerp
Dries Van Noten came out of Antwerp, out of the generation that put the Belgian city on the fashion map in the 1980s. The house never shifted its centre of gravity to Paris, even as it showed there. Klausner keeps that reach.
His references run back to the port city's traders and its painters, not to a French idea of luxury. The clothes are made to be worn and kept. He has not added a loud logo or chased a viral bag. He keeps making garments in the Antwerp manner and showing them on the Paris calendar.
That patience shows in the shows themselves. Klausner picks venues with a story, a school one season and an opera house another, and lets the setting carry part of the message. He casts wide and stages the clothes at a walking pace. Little is built for a single frame.
The verdict
The test now is time. A debut earns goodwill. A fourth collection earns a judgement. Klausner is past the introductions and into the work of building a language that belongs to him and to the house at once.
The signatures are still here. Print laid over print. Colour used without apology. Tailoring that bends toward the body without stiffening. On the evidence of the last two years, Dries Van Noten is in careful hands, and the founder's name sits easily above a younger designer's work.
The Splendid Edit on Julian Klausner's Dries Van Noten. Collection details drawn from the house and from Paris runway coverage.
Editorial image courtesy of Fashion PR Firm