NEW YORK - Some fashion designers like to put their name or logo on everything just so you'll know how important they are. Others, though, prefer to quietly turn out quality work - and let others decide just how much influence they should have.
Belgium's Dries Van Noten is one those designers, and while his name may not be familiar yet, fashion insiders have decided it should be. Van Noten's clothes come in wearable, almost practical silhouettes, but in fabrics so rich and interesting that the look is anything but boring.
Last month, the Council of Fashion Designers of America bestowed upon him its award for the best international designer of the year, and top-tier retailers such as Neiman Marcus are excited about both his current and fall collections.
"He quietly moves forward and he's so influential. Everyone pays attention to what he's doing," says Neiman's fashion director Ken Downing of Van Noten.
The spring-summer trend of painterly florals came straight from the designer's runway, Downing declares. "He's inspiring so many people, whether it's conscious or subconscious."
Downing adds: "He's all about personal style: Five women can wear Dries Van Noten and you'll see five women who look totally different."
In person, Van Noten looks more like a banker or an attorney from a small town - maybe even a bygone era. His greying hair is cut short and neat and, on this day at the Carlyle Hotel restaurant, he wears a grey pinstripe suit and blue button-down shirt with his white T-shirt peeking out and no tie.
He says he tries to use the most modern technology - when it's called for - yet retreat to a life in Belgium's countryside surrounded by flowers when he can. "You need both to live well," he says softly.
When CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg first tried to reach Van Noten by telephone this spring to tell him he'd won the group's award, she had trouble reaching him, further cementing his image as an independent artist in an increasingly corporate fashion world.
Van Noten recalls: He had forgotten his cellphone at his office - a 5,575-square-metre warehouse that had billeted both German and Allied troops during the Second World War - and there was a terrible thunderstorm that afternoon. "It was like a cheap horror movie with the lights turning on and off."
She eventually got through at the house, but it was a bad connection. All Van Noten could make out was "I have news" and something about a prize. She had to repeat the part about him winning several times, he says with a laugh.
Van Noten, 50, comes from a fashion family, but his grandfather and father, both tailors, were more interested in retailing. But Van Noten himself wasn't sold on that side of the business. He took the knowledge gained while attending fashion shows with his father and transferred it into his own designs.
Following a Jesuit education as a boy, which he credits as giving him a moral centre, he enrolled in fashion classes at Antwerp's Royal Academy.
"My father thought I'd continue in buying and selling. My father wasn't very happy with it when I went into design. I was the only one of four children with an interest in fashion," Van Noten says. "Now, he's pretty happy with it."
He launched his collection in 1986 and Barneys New York picked it up almost immediately. The business has grown steadily since then, but always at a manageable pace, he says. Being in Belgium instead of Paris, Milan or even New York allows him to be a big fish in a little pond.
