Walter Van Beirendonck (Q3665)
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Walter Van Beirendonck is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Walter Van Beirendonck |
Walter Van Beirendonck is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
After this season, Walter Van Beirendonck will be one of just two of the famed Antwerp Six still designing their eponymous labels and the only one left standing on the runway circuit. Perhaps this is why, as guests scattered around roses and carnations and other foliage at the garden location of his show today, the sun defied the weather forecast to peek through the clouds after an ominously cloudy morning. It was a serendipitous omen for Van Beirendonck, who this season was all smiles—except that he wasn’t.An equal parts eerie and playful circus tune, which grew both funnier and more uncanny as the show progressed, was the soundtrack to models walking into the garden out of Van Beirendonck’s backstage clown car: There were tiny party hats, colorful round noses, hilariously bulbous shoes, and an abundance of smiley faces. Anywhere you looked, in fact, little party treats were waiting in the form of polka dots, some diffused and as jacquard on suits and others padded, tinseled, or fuzzy and applied to trousers or reduced to flopping oversized buttons. Pierrot collars abounded too, some worn as such and others deconstructed into little shirting ruffles popping out of seams here and there.“In today’s world, everything feels endlessly dramatic,” wrote Van Beirendonck in his show notes. “Extremes everywhere, extremists getting the last laugh.” He got to the clown, he said, by thinking of the idea of finding bliss in the midst of “big situations to fight against” and in the face of what it is to “play pretend and believe that all we do can make a difference.”In his collection, Van Beirendonck explored extremes in his proportions: Handsome shrunken boy jackets played against hulking trousers, and mini top hats—by Stephen Jones—punctuated humongous tailoring. Always one with a playful sense of kink, his message to the audience was to “have fun playing with tiny tops and big bottoms.” (Make of that what you will.) He also found room to innovate, debuting a denim collaboration with G-Star Raw, its pieces all made without stitching. (They are bonded with glue and tape instead.) The most ingenious iteration of this concept was how he gave some of his tailoring funky puzzle-piece seams, which can be left open or slid closed.Prior to the show, a seatmate asked if Van Beirendonck was proof that fashion can still be political. Each guest had received a button with the words “I Have Seen the Future,” to which the designer added in his notes: “And you’re in it.
” The teddy bears and bunnies holding grenades and machine guns in his prints are proof enough that this is one designer who still understands that fashion is most compelling when it has something to say. Van Beirendonck has seen the future in our present; it’s full of clowns running the show.
19 June 2024
Pleasure hits sweetest after pain, and there were many pleasures at a show Walter van Beirendonck entitled “Banana Wink Boom!” this afternoon. Somewhere in a pocket or otherwise of everyone of these looks was a phone with its speaker on, playing variously Mazzy Star, Blondie, Bowie, Velvet Underground, and more. The personal soundtracks hung around each look as their wearers walked gingerly past—there was much confusion about the route through this show—and occasionally stepped dazedly out of each other's way.Sometimes the models were asked to make statements to the audience; mostly they were too shy to speak up enough for them to be audible (plus this was not in the job description). I did catch “I feel love.” And you kind of did.Walter’s heavily suggestive absurdist designs mix the sexual with the surreal in often hilarious ways. His orifice knits, clawed boots, baroque gimp masks, paper-doll tailoring, hip-hole belting, and alien conspiracy motifs all came together in a highly entertaining collection. Stephen Jones collaborated with gusto, adding a knitting yarn goldilocks headpiece and hyper-sized baseball caps and ushankas.The penultimate cratered bomber from which Louise Bourgeois-y spider limbs projected was especially creepy. The crowd here—many of them specific to the designer—adored it, loudly, as the auteur walked much more assuredly than his bewildered models. This felt like Walter non plus ultra.
17 January 2024
The Brutalist dungeon-like vibe of today’s runway show location clearly highlighted Walter Van Beirendonck’s intentions for this collection. In a world of superfast innovation, it’s not often we stop to consider what the potential side effects are. Initial worries about AI eventually outsmarting us and overthrowing the human race have been replaced with excitement about the possibilities of apps like chatGPT.“The world around us is transforming at breakneck speed, and it feels like we are being used as crash test dummies,” the show notes read, nodding to the crash dummy symbols printed on the collection’s skin-tight suits and hats. Printed text reading “stop terrorizing our world” further hinted at Van Beirendonck’s concerns about new tech and the people who might misuse it. It’s a slogan he’s employed in the past, including in a fall 2015 response to the terrorist attacks in Paris.The collection was named Dawleetoo after a lost jungle city in a jungle where an explorer from the late 1800s was rumored to have disappeared. Much is unknown about its settlements. Van Beirendonck created a dream world in which machines and humans live together simultaneously, designing looks for individual characters that would exist in this new unknown reality.Alien motifs mixed with various symbols to create what Van Beirendonck described as an “alien alphabet print” with the appearance of a hieroglyphic. Yellow and white were featured extensively across the collection, colors we associate with danger and safety. The Walter-isms included sunglasses with artificial noses, crocodile-painted shoes (this time with a pointier silhouette), W-caps, and body-hugging tops with bright prints.Van Beirendonck has an uncanny ability to transport people to new worlds, making them question their current reality and consider wider social problems. “There are so many issues in the world right now, from wars to financial crashes and an uncertain future. I really wanted to start a conversation about these things,” he said.
21 June 2023
Last summer Walter Van Beirendonck was in the oceanside Puglian city of Otranto. He wandered into the Cathedral of Santa Maria Annunziata and enjoyed a revelation. It was sparked by the ‘Mosaico di Otranto,’ the church’s sprawling middle-ages mosaic, which I too can attest is a wonder: an enormous and intricate musing on the nature of life and death created by forgotten hands in fragments of colored stone.Inspired, Van Beirendonck found himself sketching his own riff on the mosaic’s tree of life, creating a cast of serpentine characters with decidedly phallic characteristics and glints in their eyes. Tonight he transported these, in prints, patchworks, and intarsia, into the Salle Wagram to inhabit a collection that reflected on sex, death, and environmental collapse under the credo: “We need new eyes to see the future.”What looked like skateboard wheels were removable parts of a clothing-defined exoskeleton. Jackets bolstered with pockets at the ribcage and then jackets with cut-out sections in the same place furthered this construct. Models wore crystal-flecked fishnets as shrouds, sweaters, or stockings, funereal veils with a hint of kink that acted as a mournful emphasis on transient beauty. Many of the garments were inflatable, items of airbag protection against the cruelties of inevitable fate. These were the heavy, eternal anxieties that ran below a collection which—even after a 45 minute delay and 20 minute run time—was a fun and provocative watch.
18 January 2023
We were in the oh-so-cute Theatre de la Madeleine, all red velvet upholstery, gold paint, and squashed knees. Curtain up was due for 5pm. However Walter Van Beirendonck is a monument of Parisian fashion—he does what he wants—and it was close 50 minutes until we began. In that stretch there was plenty of time to re-acquaintance ourselves with Covid-neurosis plus a fresh twist on a runway show classic in an interaction between the audience in the stalls and the photographers clustered behind them up to capture front-of-stage. The photographers bellowed: “cross your iPhones!”Once the curtain came up nobody cared, and up went the phones. The show was split into two acts. The first saw around 12 sinisterly shrouded figures standing on stage. One by one wires whipped up their shrouds into the darkness above, and they walked. What seemed to be slowly revealed was a Beirendonck attired theater troupe from somewhere between the 16th century and the 26th. Floating ruffs and ruffle-slit sleeve jackets and shirting were presented on Bowie/Styles worthy metallics and perkily castellated shorts. “Don’t go too close to the sun,” admonished a slogan tank top.The lights dimmed, the curtain lowered, and we were starting to think of the up-and-coming Jeanne Friot due to show in a presentation three minutes later at a venue Google Maps showed was 35 minutes away in traffic. But then the curtain rose again for the second act. This was heavier on gimp, kink, and color—WvB’s traditional trinity—and it became apparent through the sloganeering that this was an anti-war collection that also exhorted onlookers to “Swallow.” This was also highly-phone worthy—those photographers had no chance.
22 June 2022
To avoid the pitchforks of a judgmental planet, Walter van Beirendonck traveled elsewhere this season. Regrettably we could only watch from afar after his live Paris show— which he said he pretty much recreated on film as planned in the flesh—was stymied by other Earthly woes this time round. Of the collection he said: “It’s called Otherworldly because I wanted to express the time we’re living in—and I think we’re living in a weird world, and a little bit in a manipulated world also.”In space no one can hear you scream “cancel him!” So WvB was free to express his “provocative power” slogan through his garment-borne references to imagined alien cultures. Built around his identity defying masks, often accessorized with new, vintage-scuba inspired sunglass-goggles from a collaboration with the Belgian brand Komono, the designer’s warp-speed collection skimmed us through the Walter-verse. From a starting point of wide-silhouette, sinister Sith Lord Sunday-downtime outerwear and roomy suiting in pressed, black glossy material, we accelerated into a compellingly shaped green wool coat with rounded, folded forward shoulders: a new extraterrestrial power silhouette. Intarsia character knitwear featuring glow in the dark yarns was worn space-ravily against full-kneed lurex pants: a definite winner whatever your orbit. A bourgeois Belle du Jour alien in a chic check skirt suit and oversized lurex pussy bow was not from around here. So what did WvB reckon aliens would think about Planet Fashion were they to land on Planet Earth? He said: “I don’t know, but I think they will understand what I’m doing. And I think they’re going to like it.”
12 February 2022
One imagines that attending a rave in the company of Walter Van Beirendonck would be a nosebleed good time. When we jumped on a call last month to discuss this collection, the images here were not yet made, however WvB had conjured instead a movie outlining his thesis for the season. “I was reading about how subcultures today don’t have the conditions in which to blossom and grow. I was always very fascinated by subcultures and how they are created—they have so much impact on fashion, and everything. So I thought why not make my own subculture.”The result of WvB’s hydroponically raised subculture was a fictional band named The Subs, who were preparing for a year 2057 world tour by clobbering up in his costume. As he explained that the fictional group was played by the the real Belgian trance technoists The Sums, he was wearing a great hoodie featuring a smiley and the name of their gorgeous recent tune, “I Want To Dance Again,” whose awesome video features some unmistakeable WvB.Neon Shadow was imagined by the designer as the leading lights in a futuristic tribe of menswear flamboyants called the Pee Cocks (you don’t get that at Pitti). From lasercut cloaks with integrated gimp masks, to acid, citrus suiting and some fine prints contrasting “gnomes with sex toys,” this was a collection for every occasion that might happen to intersect with 10 hours jacking in front of a bass bin (always the best spot). WvB extended the conceit to produce a fanzine—the true mark of an old-school scene—and have The Subs recorded a ‘Neon Shadow’ tune. As we parlayed WvB mentioned that his collaborators are currently working on setting up a rave at the Sportpaleis in Antwerp for September or October: “Am I going? Yeah, yeah, yeah!”
7 July 2021
Even in isolation Walter Van Beirendonck has detected connection. He is buoyed—“this makes me very proud and happy,” he said—that a new generation of fashion freshmen, youngsters whose eyes are fresh and whose thirst for the transformative powers of punchy clothes is not yet jaded, are discovering him on social media and really getting into it. “There are a lot of posts I see where young people are discovering some vintage things of mine from the ’90s and being really excited to see something that for them is totally new.”This was not a retrospective collection, but it did contain certain tics and motifs drawn from those earlier phases of the Van Beirendonck narrative. These included Sado, the designer’s beloved dog after whom his first collection in 1982 was named and who for a while was house mascot, the super-alien Puk Puk (from the planet Dork) who illustrated his ideas in the “W.&L.T.” collections of the 1990s, and Walterman, the naked logo character who was based on the designer himself.All these (and other) past incarnations of different chapters in Van Beirendonck’s past featured in a collection he titled “Future Proof.” He said, “It’s nice to play around with time, and hopefully in 2050 people will refer to the collection we are seeing today.” When that happens, those future fashion freshmen will encounter remnants of a 2021 marked by the designer’s fearsomely meaningful masks (another tradition renewed) and his dance-floor-friendly blending of the cartoonish and the nuanced with a consistent twist of kink. It’s a powerful and evergreen recipe.
28 January 2021
Walter Van Beirendonck worked with his former student, Tokyo-based Eli Effenberger to make this excellent collection presentation video and portfolio. Pre-Zooming, he said: “I was inspired by what the couturiers did after the war, the “Théâtre de la Mode.”... So we made the collection in miniature and dressed them on gold dolls, with makeup and everything…and really that was the only way I could do it at the moment. Because we are still making our final garments, which will be in the digital showroom next week.”After he mentioned that the collection is entitled Mirror, references shamanistic practice, and contains panels of mirrored fabric, I wondered if Walter had made an all-mirrored look. “No, because I created 22 looks and they’re all very wearable,” he said. “I didn’t want to do something difficult to put on.”The ghostly, diffused-color sprayed cowl tops in fringed polyester appeared utterly shaman-appropriate, and rave-ready—for whenever that might safely happen again—as did the animalia-flecked cycling pieces. The notions of reflection and transcendence alluded to in his title and those panels also looked right on the money for this moment. Looking at the garments as made in miniature, it was interesting to note the scaled-up texture of the drill and fringing.For most designers in the spectrum, this collection would count at bold. However Van Beirendonck is beloved for a boldness so consistent that this collection appeared rather restrained. As he observed: “To do something very extreme could have been too much. For me, this is a time to concentrate on the reality.” Concentrating on reality is absolutely the right way to do things right now. But a satisfying aspect of Van Beirendonck’s work is that his pieces look party-ready even in the most parlous times.
9 July 2020
“I hate fashion copycats,” it said upon the Peter Saville–copy sequin T-shirt featuring before and after images of Walter Van Beirendonck that closed this highly entertaining show. The designer said: “It’s really a collection about having the possibility to be free to enjoy beauty. It’s really a statement about that because I think that during the last [few] years, we really have less and less freedom—everything is so sensitive.”He wasn’t talking about cultural sensitivity, I think. It was more about delicacy, tact, and taste. So we had an opening section that made Valentino’s rock-stud years seem restrained with defensive negative spikes everywhere. Then we drifted into a gauzily bucolic episode whose highlights were the abstract landscape overcoats and puffers: beautiful. After that came a crazy Beau Brummell via the Mystery Machine peak rockabilly Partridge Family moment that was exceptionally strange and compelling: all collar and hair.Van Beirendonck is today a truth-telling outlier, which is a great place to be. His significant intellect delivers profundity absurdly. We might disregard him now—rushing to some other show with a budget—but we will look back and think he was right. He was this afternoon, both very right and very excellent.
15 January 2020
Walter Van Beirendonck called the clothes in this showing of kinky sportswear deluxe “Alien Vintage” and said that the collection was designed to attire his fantasy community of extraterrestrials. As he mused in his notes: “I pictured being introduced to a small part of the alien folk, a community with such a limitless diversity of forms and looks.” Those forms included four-armed biped, as evinced by outfits with two extra sleeves below the armpit, and aliens with fearsomely hunky quads as per the cool, gathered baggy pants in primary-color nylon.There were a lot of shower-cap–frilled lizard attachments in plastic sheeting or built into sheer, sometimes rainbow-toned jackets, plus some dramatically angular outerwear and quilted tailoring. The peppy-color silk shirting, leggings (really), and bodystockings sometimes seem transported less from an alien dimension than the race track or vaudeville, but suited most of all for a batshit-crazy dance party. The fishnets, devil-horned parka, and gimp mask were more than a nod and a wink to other off-the-dance-floor delights.
19 June 2019
These weren’t clothes that you wear; these were clothes that wear you. Most especially towards the end, when Walter Van Beirendonck’s outfits became crazily zoomorphic via shaggy-backed pillows printed with eyes and smiles stuffed into the belted webbing of strappy bomber jackets (but also through the vivid dripping panels of color that ran throughout or the mouth-toed sneaker socks), this was a collection that seemed very much alive.You had to admire the technical artistry of the color-patched tailoring, knits, semi-sheer dress, and cashmere coats. None really required a synthetic Van Beirendonck beard, mohawk, or gimp mask—some of the styling proposals on offer—to draw the eye. There was a funny interlude involving pink polka-dot shirting and double-breasted short peacoats with collars large enough to make 1974 file for copyright infringement. Shaggy-backed and -collared voluminously hooded overcoats in single colors felt, in this context, almost conservative.At times this collection veered into fashion-forward-Pennywise territory, but it was supposed to provoke. As those eyes looked at you, you couldn’t take your eyes off it.
16 January 2019
Titled Wild Is the Wind (and featuring covers of the song by Nina Simone, David Bowie, and George Michael), this excellent Walter Van Beirendonck collection was typically batshit bonkers, and sometimes beautiful with it.Because Valentino was about to start when this show ended, there was no time to debate with Vera-with-the-list-I-wasn’t-on-who-couldn’t-see-past-it about whether it was possible to go backstage and ask Van Beirendonck for a quick exegesis of a show that clearly demanded it. From the birds and donkeys on his jacquard jackets, overcoats, and rubber macs to the skeleton theme that ran through the collection, most interestingly via the skeletal mesh of webbing around which many of the striking pieces of outerwear were modularly constructed, there was clearly an underlying message here—and some anger, too.There were some fantastic nearly knee-high suede sneakers produced in collaboration and some striking clogs—the shark clogs were the best—delivered by René van den Berg. What was up with the incredible long feathers that some models wore off either shoulder? Was the watch bracelet a sly critique of ostentatious masculine consumerism? And similarly, but in a feminine direction, the collarless Chanel-shaped jacket? Only Van Beirendonck, whose image was on many of the pieces, could have delivered the answers. But no dice. Still, sometimes you don’t need to know what something is about to appreciate it, and there was much to enjoy here.
20 June 2018
Top. Bottom. Masks. A print entitled “gangbang” that looked to be pretty literal. Pig. As Walter Van Beirendonck confirmed after this show, this was a collection firmly focused on fetish, recreational sex, and the freedom that represents. The sun and the moon on the vaguely Dürer-esque embroideries on two beautiful overcoats, plus the fitted printed tops, were Van Beirendonck code for S&M.For those ignorant souls, including this one, who have only ever worn waders while fishing (I mean, what else would you ever do in them?), there were probably a lot of specialist references here lost in translation. Totally apparent, however, was what an awesome inspiration for forward-facing technicalwear with a PVC shine fetish most certainly is. Take away those nipple-exposing glory holes and you can see Van Beirendonck’s pig mask/hoods and box-shoulder cagoule/sleeping bag hybrids going, if not mainstream, very festival-relevant—sort of sexy pagan hazmat attire. Quilted pants unbuttonable from ankle to waist, body stockings printed with a codified rundown of Van Beirendonck’s source material, and the odd quaintly surprising piece of normwear—a suit!—were other diversions in a collection that was both eye-opening and ear stimulating, thanks to the mutedly nosebleed soundtrack delivered by Orphan Swords.
17 January 2018
If there was ever a collection crying out for designer exegesis, it was this one from Walter Van Beirendonck. Its title, Owls Whisper, was as suggestive and simultaneously imprecise as its clothes. The designer clearly had something on his mind, but what? Finding out from the man himself was out of the question, sadly. It ran so late that he took his bow just six minutes before the next show was due to start. And there was no chance to ooze backstage preshow: The crowd was locked out of the venue for 25 minutes after start time.The clothes were as interesting as the organization was bad. But the precise meaning of them was as easy to grasp as the smoke from a snuffed candle. Every model wore strange lateral mullet wigs in soft pastels. The first look included an odd padded top with capsule inserts to emphasize abs and pecs. After an interval of momentum gathering, we saw a series of fantastic parkas and pants in orange and green that had extended articulated arms with wide sawtooth-pattern paneling. Later, a shorter version of the jacket came with a hood and some ears. It conjured images of crocodiles (because they were mentioned on the soundtrack) and dinosaurs and evolution.Meanwhile, a series of skintight shorts that morphed into leggings came printed with two vaguely pagan figures on the front and more of those serrations on the back. Once the design was inverted, two glowing orange orbs were inserted. They did look a bit like owl’s eyes glowing in the dark. Around all this was plenty of peppy check suiting, some with deconstructed arms, some with external shoulder pads. Suiting morphed into bomber jackets. Then back to two tailored jackets in a Lurex-shiny jacquard that featured paneled illustrations, Picasso-by-numbers style, of faces and chains and maybe a snake and some other stuff. After that, a jacket and a couple of shirts whose facades were made in panels of fabric that repeated those abstract faces, including one with saw-serrated teeth that evoked a little of the Count fromSesame Street.Apart from concluding that the boots were awesome and that Van Beirendonck is no mean slouch when it comes to tailoring, the most powerful takeaway from this collection was regret that the designer’s meta-narrative and timekeeping were impossible to reconcile. Great fun, though, whatever it meant.
21 June 2017
To see a designer for the first time—especially one as famous as Walter Van Beirendonck, one of the Antwerp Six, no less—is always a thrill. Can they possibly match your expectation? In this case, yes, yes, yes.Six or seven guys, horned and with chests of straw, played steel drums. In front of them, several guys with equally Matthew Barney–esque protuberances riffed on panpipes. They parped. In front of them was a pagan master of ceremonies, uniquely equipped with red hair, who cavorted like Dionysus.The actual looks were always going to appear slightly banal after this preamble, but Van Beirendonck countered that by hoisting hugely oversize gloves and meaningful swathings of neckties around them. For an event that felt so pagan, it was almost subversive how middle of road the first few looks were; an apricot velvet evening jacket was totally Tom Ford. Slowly things grew weirder. Tradition was left far behind on boilersuits patterned with felted medieval big cats. General lunacy ensued.By the end Pan was shaking his bells in a frenzy. One half expected his backing troupe to start ravishing the audience. Clothes were secondary to ecstasy, and both were quite good.
18 January 2017
InAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Hatter poses a riddle: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” His answer? “I haven’t the slightest idea!” That futile search for an answer, for truth, is something that has been obsessing Walter Van Beirendonck’s work lately. You may be forgiven for overlooking it, given how jovial his clothes consistently appear, splattered with color and pattern. But there’s darkness there. For Spring, Van Beirendonck titled his show after the Hatter’s unsolvable conundrum. The designer has been watching, and commenting through his clothing, as the world has wound itself into a tangled mess over the past few seasons. There’s been a visceral anger. Perhaps this time around he decided it was all a little too much? The slogans printed on Van Beirendonck’s clothes underlined the apocalyptic note, “Reflection Through Destruction” being the blackest. How do you know what you’ve got until it’s gone? Another message was “Future Folk,” which seemed to connect with the handicraft evident in Van Beirendonck’s creations. A credit for “wearable art pieces” alluded to Arcimboldean constructs of plastic combs and household items, chained together to make tabards with faces peering out. Yet more winked out from jackets, grosgrain ribbon framing holes cut through to the flesh and trailing streamers, like strange folkloric dress. He used Staphorsterstipwerk, a traditional Dutch printing method, on a series of outerwear pieces. The town of Staphorst, where this fabric is produced—Van Beirendonck credited a local craftsman with its creation—is notable for its devout adherence to orthodox Calvinism, best illustrated by the fact that many inhabitants sport traditional Dutch costume long outmoded elsewhere in the country. Van Beirendonck’s iterations had a “W” worked into the surface. That was the folk. What about the only notable slogan—“Brutal Beauty”? That was best evoked through the closing series of bondage-strapped suits in somber colors. Protection, or prison? You can be sure they weren’t intended to just chime with the utility feel we’ve seen across the rest of the season. Van Beirendonck once stated that, even when discussing something tough, he always tries to tell it in a lighthearted and positive way. That can sometimes mean his clothes wind up feeling childlike or innocent, when in actual fact they are extremely knowing—just as Alice’s Wonderland is, perhaps, too dark to be quite the children’s classic it has become.
That book is frequently dubbed “literary nonsense,” a broad categorization of writing that subverts logic and language convention. It sometimes seems to have no meaning but always has a message. The same is true of Van Beirendonck’s clothing.
22 June 2016
Walter Van Beirendonckwas sporting a sweatshirt emblazoned with the wordWOESTin bold capitals; one of the models in his Fall 2016 show wore a transparent PVC sweatshirt with a patch bearing the same slogan (Van Beirendonck’s own sweatshirt, incidentally, wasn’t see-through). If it made you think of woe, of melancholy, of sadness, you thought wrong. “It’s a Flemish word, my language,” said Van Beirendonck. “It means ‘furious.’ Because I am really angry.”You don’t expect that from Van Beirendonck, either the man himself, whose apple cheeks and generous graying beard give him a Santa Claus look, nor his fashion. The offering this season was colorful, playful, eccentric, and exciting as usual. There was a globe-trotting aspect to gilt chains strung across the face; layered, woven silks; generous trousers with brief skirts worn djellaba-style; sweeping blanket coats in squiggle graphics and multiple colors; designs that resembled totem poles or monstrous faces—cartoonish monsters, rather than the really scary kind.However, Van Beirendonck wanted these to express rage above anything else. “I’m a pacifist,” he stated. “But really, I want to punch someone in the face.” The agitator? How screwed up the world is right now, and how the politics of world leaders are to blame. He threw in a few expletives for good measure, to hammer home his anti-establishment point.Van Beirendonck’s previous work has been fixated on world events; in the ’90s, his collections tub-thumped a serious message of safe sex, despite their zinging colors and overall sense of spontaneity. Those offerings had a healthy dose of on-message latex—one even garroted the models’ faces with it, and they tumbled from the catwalk. No one fell this season; nevertheless, there were hints that Van Beirendonck was in a rather pessimistic mood. All the fur (it was teddy bear–ish, but also kind of beastly) and leopard print that punctuated the lineup was an expression of animalistic aggression, and the closing outfit was a dour black coat with an anthropomorphic figure clambering across it. Van Beirendonck compared humanity, like that figure, to puppets in a vast political game, and commented that he’d never previously closed a collection with a black outfit. Dark times, dark clothes. Dark in meaning, if not necessarily hue.It’s easy to scoff off meaning like this when it’s embedded in fashion. However, these shows are taking place under a fresh rash of laws dubbed “Vigipirate”—anti-terrorism—in France.
After one’s body and bags had been scanned by metal detectors and passport checked upon entrance to fashion shows, it wasn’t the superficial impact of Van Beirendonck’s cheery surfaces that stuck in your mind, but the message that lurked beneath the facade of apparent optimism.
20 January 2016
There are photos of David Bowie in 1971—long-haired, wide-brimmed bippity-boppity hat, ludicrously huge trousers—pushing his 3-week old son Zowie in a pram, wife Angie at his side. From our mundane, homogenized 21st-century vantage point, it looks like aliens have landed. But when Walter Van Beirendonck laid eyes on the pictures, all he saw was sweet inspiration.He called his new collection Electric Eye, after Bowie's song "Moonage Daydream": "Keep your electric eye on me, babe." But the Electric Eye has taken on a sinister resonance since Bowie penned that song 44 years ago. "We're overwhelmed by cameras," Van Beirondonck mourned. "Not just selfies, but ISIS … we're obliged to see everything dreadful that's going on." The collection he showed was superficially quite happy, hyper-flared, childlike in its almost-fairy-tale print motifs, but black clouds glowered. The opening passage of black suits with infections of naive print were, according to Van Beirendonck, representative of freedom and freshness overwhelmed by dark forces. Pessimistic? That was just the beginning.Van Beirendonck is as polarizing as his number one fan, Rei Kawakubo. The print component of this collection was nursery sweetness and innocence … to a point. Stephen Jones, responsible for the huge feathered insectoid hats that closed the show, talked about visiting WVB's house and seeing the shelves of toys, and a sense of charming play did seep into the graphics. The WVB menagerie—snake, bear, rabbit—was jacquard-ed into a blouson. A little leather jacket featured a befanged, befringed monster in the back. And in this context, even a pink latex tee looked a little less knowing. That was because the big black cloud generated by the Electric Eye—aided by thunderbolts and lightning—was hovering as an ominous counterpoint.The story WVB was telling was doom and gloom. Everything he holds dear is being ground to inconsequence. Looking for a way out, a trapped soul might latch on to the mushrooms that were a key visual. Magic? Not to Van Beirondonck, but to others, they might be a key to open the doors of perception. As much as he doubts that, Walter seemed blissfully happy to be the gatekeeper today.
24 June 2015
After his show last season, Walter Van Beirendonck felt he'd had enough of big statements. He wanted to make a collection that was about nothing other than 15 minutes of beauty. But current events conspired against him. First, artist Paul McCarthy's seasonal sculpture was removed from the Place Vendôme after only one day on display following a public outcry. Turned out one man's Christmas tree was another man's butt plug. WVB was dismayed at the attack on freedom of artistic expression. Then theCharlie Hebdotragedy happened and 15 minutes of beauty was no longer enough for the designer. His genetic predisposition toward provocative comment reasserted itself."Stop terrorising our world," read the message on the long plastic tunic over the voluminous pants that made up the first look. The messages that followed were no less direct: "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." "Warning: Explicit Beauty," blared another plastic top, a reminder, perhaps, that the material is often associated with fetishwear. There was also a suggestion of transgression in the eye makeup (proper '50s couture stuff) and the butt plug pendants (all the "jewelry" was 3-D-printed) and the languid flou of the clothes, which felt eccentrically feminine.From the front, the coats and jackets were composed of fine wools and rich ikats, but when they turned round, they were backed in the cheapest calico. "Blame Style.com," said the designer, with a conciliatory chuckle. "You rarely show the back of garments." The same notion of a split personality was also evident in tops that were a blazer on one arm, a cape on the other. Another outfit had fur trailing from one shoulder and an enormous toy town epaulette on its opposite number. The final outfits featured a huge flounce of tulle that extended one sleeve into a wing, duality in dress carried to an illogical extreme. Couple all of that with the heavily collaged elements (again, the masculine and feminine) in the collection and you were left with the lingering impression that this was one of WVB's moretheoreticaloutings. From wanting to make no big statement at all, he had ended up making one of his biggest yet about the duality of human nature. Inevitable, really, with barbarism and civilization facing off on the streets of Paris mere days before the shows.
21 January 2015
Walter Van Beirendonck's collections, combining beauty and horror, banality and the otherworldly in equal degree, are unique in fashion. His latest menswear offering was a perfect case in point. An impulse to change the basic construction of menswear yielded brocade jackets dissected and decorated with seemingly random discs of fabric. Rendered in purest white, the impulse took on a different weight, the discs becoming protective shields for the torso. And given that the symbol for CCTV footage dominated WVB's show notes, it was clear what we were being protected from. In his eyes, an invasion of privacy was a mere precursor to God knows what other predations.There is no one else who can spark such dark thoughts with such seemingly joyous clothes. This show ended with models reconfigured as exotic tribal birdmen, their faces bifurcated by huge beaks. On one side of the divide, they were painted in monochrome, on the other, bright colors. WVB imagined surveillance cameras confused by the split, in the same way that warships in WWII were painted with op-art "dazzle camouflage." But he was also thinking about Papua New Guinea, a longtime fascination, and how aboriginal cultures grant a totemic significance to ordinary objects from the West. Sitting in the audience at a WVB show, you were compelled to reflect on the way the same fetishizing impulse applies to our own culture. What is fashion, after all? The collage of bits and pieces—an epaulette of golden fringes, a bridal veil, a pussycat, an orange, an AK-47—that decorated WVB's clothes were as random or as meaningful as we wanted them to be. Only one thing was certain: Big Brother's all-seeing CCTV eye would be able to make no sense at all of them, and in that thought, there was some kind of perverse reassurance.
24 June 2014
"Crossed Crocodiles Growl." Sounds like an anagram or a cryptic crossword clue, but today it was the title Walter Van Beirendonck gave his Fall collection. Turns out crossed crocodiles are a symbol of unity in diversity in some parts of Africa. That was the humanist, we're-all-in-this-together message at the root of a show in which WVB took a stand against racism. "It's a problem everywhere, in Russia particularly," he said.Russia is about to host the Winter Olympics. Is that why WVB couched his protest in the context of winter sports? There were outfits here that adventurous skiers and snowboarders could pluck right off the catwalk. Still, the strongest visual of the collection was vintage WVB: boys in pastel army helmets wearing bomb disposal squad protective gear reconfigured in college stripes. "We need to go to war on racism," was the designer's rationale for looks that concealed deadly serious intent in a joyous candy coating. Typical WVB, in other words. He puts a smile on your face, then he slaps it.A few of the models sported Stephen Jones' huge, feathered Native American headdresses painted with the "Stop Racism" message (in Russian as well as English). Some might see that as a dig at the headdresses Chanel showed in Dallas recently, but Van Beirendonck seemed to be making a larger point. In the same way that the feathered pieces were a reminder of one culture that has been decimated by racism, there were also motifs and markings borrowed from the Aborigines, another tribal culture that has gained nothing from exposure to "civilization."WVB's longtime respect for indigenous tribalism means such references were integrated into his fashion vocabulary a long time ago. He has created his own kind of techno-tribalism, a colorful stew of cartoons, rave culture, and political paganism, aimed at unhinging the classic codes of menswear and, by extension, the society that puts those codes in place. Hence the way a blazer was expertly sliced and diced into a protective breastplate.Many of the models wearing such pieces were extraordinarily fresh-faced, even by fashion standards, which could be construed as WVB issuing a call to arms to the young who want no truck with an older generation's-isms and -phobias.
But in keeping with the dark streak that trickles through this designer's work, there was also the suspicion that he was acknowledging that it is precisely the young (if not specifically college boys, at least their peers) who make up the armies who fight—and die—for that older generation. Anyone who ever believed that fashion was incapable of holding a thought has clearly never encountered Walter Van Beirendonck.
14 January 2014
You could write a book about the names Walter Van Beirendonck has given his collections over the years, so laden with ambiguous promise—or threat—have they been. The latest, Home Sweet Home, began with literally gilded youths sissified in pastels and foulards like a Bosie Douglas for the 21st century—confusing at first, but soon it became clear that the title actually spelled out the story of the show in a straightforward way. It was an ingenious salute to the house Van Beirendonck and his partner, Dirk Van Saene, share in a village outside Antwerp.So a pair of silken trousers was printed with a carpet pattern that also appeared on a T-shirt, where a table with a vase of flowers sat in splendid trompe l'oeil. A similar image woven tapestry-like into a jacket projected the flowers into full 3-D bloom. Another replaced the vase with a toy horse. Van Beirendonck reproduced the pattern of a couch cover on a dinner jacket, and re-created walls with the art hanging in situ, just like at home. The work of American folk artist Scooter LaForge was recognizable from the painting he'd supplied for the invitation.These were obvious showpieces, with the concept extended to Katrantzou-like levels of complexity. But, as artful as the execution was, Van Beirendonck never lost track of the fact that he was making clothes first and foremost. This was clearest in suits and coats in angular color-blocks of pastel. Though they were actually abstract renditions of spaces in Van Beirendonck's house, they came across as a fresh take on tailoring.Walterites will be pleased to hear that Van Beirendonck, who often insinuates radical social messages into his work, doesn't go soft when he goes home. His shoes were decked with proudly erect phallic symbols, and the Lurex socks that slipped into them were embroidered with phalli, too—and birds and snails, which also seemed redolent of some sexual Shakespearean subtext. And Stephen Jones put long, hard bills on the raffia caps he supplied for the collection.
25 June 2013
Most designers name their collections, but Walter Van Beirendonck stands alone in making his titles a philosophical challenge. "Shut Your Eyes to See" was the latest. "The world is so overwhelming that you need to look into yourself," he explained. "Find your own identity, that's what matters. And you have to protect it."By way of illustration, WVB delved into his own past, and the performer who posed such extravagant queries about identity that he changed a generation. Who else but David Bowie, the man, once again, of the moment? Surprisingly, WVB—13 years old whenZiggy Stardustwas released—had never before gone to the glam well for inspiration. He made up for it here. The collection had the glitter of Lurex, the sheen of spacey metallics, the height of a platform boot, the decadent depth of its Dorian Gray finale.Contaminationis a word that has cropped up a couple of times during this season of shows. WVB's career has always testified to the power of oppositions colliding, transmogrifying. He's a fantastic tailor, but he can't see a pin-sharp piece without wanting to do something iconoclastic to it. Here, perfectly decent jackets were roundly abused with Christmas tinsel. In the same vein, he patched an abstract doll figure out of Lurex onto an army green blazer, and zagged a major zig, also Lurex, down another jacket, this one a sober navy. TheAladdin Saneflash is one of the most iconic emblems of the late twentieth century, a potency that was acknowledged by its appearance here. WVB dropped Bowie's eye into the mix as an atavistic symbol. He also wired glittery red lips over his models' mouths. "Mick Jagger," he laughed. Jagger, almost Bowie's match in the fluidity of his identities, was evoked in a Lurex Infanta dress that duplicated the pristine white affair designed by Mr. Fish for the Stones' free concert in Hyde Park in 1969.All of that only means that there are levels upon levels in a WVB collection. This was a particularly rich one because of the designer's lifelong connection to its source material. But there's always something more that makes him such a provocative proposition. In amongst the playfulness, the momentum of the presentation, he hits the heart of darkness. Here, at the finale, the Starman was alone, in a proper pipe-and-slippers dressing gown. It was a fabulously downbeat conceit with which to close a fabulously upbeat show.
15 January 2013
Walter Van Beirendonck has always been fascinated by what goes on behind closed doors. Dark secrets have nourished his muse. Aghast at the modern inclination to let it all hang out, he designed his new collection as an effort to reinstate the primacy of privacy. A noble intention, but it would have been better if he'd selected a protagonist other than the character who—in his top hat, bow tie, white shirt, striped boxers, socks, and garters—looked like the stuffy old hypocrite caught with his pants down in a French farce. There were even body harnesses, because isn't there always at least a little light bondage when private peccadilloes are dragged kicking and screaming into the headlines? (Although Van Beirendonck did seem to be airing his ennui at the predictability of such peccadilloes by co-opting Poly Styrene's battle cry "Oh Bondage, Up Yours!")The designer said he was focusing on secret societies as the last bastion of privacy, with their ritualistic arcana designed to keep the socially networking hordes at the door. It's a great idea for a dinner party dialogue, but it lost something on its way to the catwalk, perhaps because there was something as formal and old-fashioned about the idea as the styles that Van Beirendonck was proposing. The pulse-racing heat of a convincing conspiracy theory was conspicuously absent, even if the red lightning bolts on black patent shoes were surely a sign ofsomething. Walter mentioned Freemasonry, for instance, but you had to look hard to spot the symbols. (Major kudos for taking the risk, however. Let's get more Masons into menswear.)His track record for choosing the right collaborators remained unimpeached by Folkert de Jong, who created the hat and collar sculptures. One of them hinted at what happens to reputations when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are unleashed after secrets are spilled.
27 June 2012
Lust never sleeps. The title Walter Van Beirendonck gave his new show acknowledged the durability of our baser instincts. The clothes he made to accompany that acknowledgement won't be matched on any other catwalk this season. Their combination of cartoonish joie de vivre and deeply sinister subtext was unsettling, a reaction that WVB has effortlessly courted throughout his career, as anyone who had the pleasure of seeing his recent career retrospective in Antwerp will know.The collection was based around a literal face-off between masks: the kind that warriors in Papua, New Guinea, or voodoo high priests in the Caribbean paint on, and the leather kind that Western fetishists wear in big-city sex clubs. Van Beirendonck's standard cast of African models wore these masks, most of them in an Elastoplast pink that was like a parody of Caucasian skin. He insisted that was simply because he liked the contrast, but the effect was profoundly disturbing.And maybe it's just because Van Beirendonck makes you think such thoughts, but it was hard to resist the idea that his sleekly civilized tailored suits were also a mask for a whole repertoire of beastly impulses. Lust never sleeps, remember. The designer certainly was full-on with his fetish references—not just the masks, but full-body leather waders, fluffy mohairs, and pointy little details such as the black rubber padlock around one model's neck or the tiny tufts of fur that defined the fingernails on a candy-colored leather body glove. One set of waders, in leaf green leather, was worn over a jacket, shirt, and bow tie that matched. This outfit seemed particularly worthy of a psycho/sociological fashion analysis for the way in which propriety was restrained. The fact that it was all in cartoony colors hardly diminished its force. In fact, it simply highlighted the fact that the collection was a natural heir to Vivienne Westwood's SEX shop or Stanley Kubrick'sA Clockwork Orange, two other instances of cartoon antics masking a lethal assault on the everyday. Stepping outside the Espace Commines into a drizzly Saturday morning, it was instantly, sadly obvious that the everyday will never, ever know what had hit it.
20 January 2012
In September, Walter Van Beirendonck's first 25 years in business will be celebrated byDream the World Awake, a huge retrospective in his hometown of Antwerp. An equally sizeable monograph will mark the moment for posterity. They're the kind of acknowledgements that would make any designer blissfully happy. And that was clearly Walter's state of mind when he called his new collection Cloud #9. "It's the highest state of happiness," he said backstage. But this was nirvana WVB-style: a hyper-state of ice cream-colored jacquards and starburst-patchworked plaids, with matching bow ties and shoes and surreally artificial quiffs. It was as though Pee-wee Herman had taken St. Peter's place at the gates of heaven. (The bicep-length leather gloves fashioned after psychedelic Indian totem poles also had something ofPee-wee's Playhouseabout them.)The parade climaxed in orgasmic explosions of ruffles that would have made Leigh Bowery green with envy. A collaboration with Austrian artist Erwin Wurm, the frills managed to be playfulandmenacing, a balance that Van Beirendonck has mastered over the years. It was that same paradoxical spirit that saw his immaculately sharp tailoring steadily devolve into shreds as the show wore on. In Walt's world, chaos follows order as night follows day. It's not the conventional take on progress, but it's all his. And we love him for it.
23 June 2011
Walter Van Beirendonck's irresistible show opened with the sartorial sleekness of a slimly tailored suit, shirt, and tie, all in pale gray. The same outfit in dark gray closed the presentation, but by this time, it had grown a huge green coat swathed in thick fringe. "Classic men's fabrics clashed with fantasy things"—that was WVB's own description. The collision of opposites produced progressively more colorful and extreme ideas. First, that initial narrow, monochrome proposition became infected with bold patches of print, then side seams sprouted buttons that, when undone, turned jackets and knitwear into ponchos and capes. Then came the big, brash volume of the fringed finale. "The clothes almost grew on the catwalk," said the designer.The rhythm—from restraint to release—was echoed on Walter's sweater, which read "Something Big is Coming," with the "i" in "Big" depicted by something he called a friendship symbol. Hand-on-heart human bonds formed the soul of a collection that has never shied away from big humanist statements in the past. All the models were black Africans found in a street casting. They could easily have been drawn from the global fraternity of sport with their uniform suits, their stripy scarves, even the mascot-worthy fringed coats.Maybe it was the silhouettes, maybe it was the models. This was a more elegant outing for WVB than his recent shows with their bombs and bears. Men in skirts have never looked more quietly chic. But Walter still likes to show his teeth. Here, they were shark fangs, brilliantly painted on faces, to match the shark-shaped knapsack. You see, WVB understands that not everything in this life can be about peace, love, and understanding.
20 January 2011
Like Rei Kawakubo, who counts herself a fan, Walter Van Beirendonck is fearless in his assault on fashion orthodoxy. He's militant too, except that the designer's burly, bearded army takes aim at what he sees as fashion's close-mindedness dressed in pink and plaid and combat shorts with a pie-crust frill, all together in the same outfit and wrapped in a big pink bow.But Van Beirendonck's seriousness of purpose is quite clear. His new collection was called Read My Skin, and it included a pastel-colored group of suits, shirts, and shorts "scarified" with words like "fear," "faith," and "hope," alongside slogans like "PoetsUnite." The results were anything but didactic. The scarification created an effect similar to broderie anglaise, which, in tandem with the powder pink and blue, was disconcertingly pretty.Van Beirendonck likes disconcerting, but he also likes playful. He mixed florals and plaids, and wrapped a couple of outfits in elongated tiger and crocodile knapsacks by London accessories company Chris&Tibor—enough to bring out the kid in anyone. The in-yer-face finale featured bodybuilders in breastplates of pearls and colored stones; look closely at their candy-colored combats and you saw the word "hope" again. The same word was on the invitation, in large letters that looked peppered with bullet holes. Perhaps the designer was reminding us that hope is a fragile thing.
24 June 2010