A radical classicist meets a classic radical: the fashion designer Dries Van Noten and Sterling Ruby, the artist who launched his own clothing line, SR STUDIO LA CA, in 2019, first physically met on a railway platform in Antwerp that year. Each already knew of the other, of course, having not only a deep respect and admiration for each other’s work, but a certain innate kinship. They are connected through craft, colour and a love of the transformative power of dress. Even though, on the surface, they are from two very different worlds.
Dries Van Noten, who comes from a family of tailors, has been a fashion stalwart since the 1980s. He designed his first menswear collection in 1986. That same year he opened his first boutique in Antwerp, where he was born and raised, where he studied (at the esteemed Royal Academy) and still lives and works. He has shown his womenswear in Paris since 1993, acclaimed consistently for his painterly mixes of pattern and hue. Van Noten’s references to art are frequent but never slavish: one collection drew its distinct, intensely unusual palette – of purple bruise, ochre and a pink that Suzy Menkes described as “rotting shrimp” – from the work of Francis Bacon. Once you knew, you wondered why you hadn’t figured it out earlier. Van Noten’s fine art interests and inspirations were laid bare in his 2014 retrospective exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where his pieces were placed alongside works by Yves Klein and van Dyck, Boldini, Bronzino and Richter. But Van Noten doesn’t believe in a hierarchy or snobbism: his clothes were not
