The Rose Petal Show

In the spring of 1994, Dries Van Noten showed his Spring/Summer collection at the Passage Brady — a glass-roofed shopping arcade in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, the kind of covered passage that Walter Benjamin had written about as the architectural unconscious of nineteenth-century capitalism — and as the final models walked, a spectrum of orange, pink, and red rose petals rained down from above the glass ceiling onto the runway and the audience, and the gesture was so unexpected, so extravagant, and so perfectly calibrated to the collection it concluded that it has become the single most frequently cited moment in Van Noten’s forty-year career. The rose petals were not ironic. They were not conceptual. They were, in the vocabulary of a designer who has never trusted the distance between fashion and feeling, simply beautiful — and their beauty was inseparable from the fact that they fell on clothes that were themselves an argument for beauty as a form of resistance against the minimalism that dominated mid-1990s fashion with the severity of a doctrine.

Van Noten had arrived in Paris as a member of the Antwerp Six — the group of Royal Academy graduates who, in 1986, rented a truck, packed their collections, and drove to the British Designer Show at Olympia Hall in London, where the international press, unable to pronounce their Flemish names, grouped them under a geographic label that would define Belgian fashion for a generation. The six — Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee — were united by their training under Linda Loppa at the Royal Academy and by the conviction that fashion could be an intellectual discipline rather than a commercial one, but their aesthetics diverged radically: Demeulemeester worked in black, in shadow, in the poetic melancholy of Patti Smith and the Romantic poets; Bikkembergs fused sportswear with fetishism; Beirendonck pushed toward the graphic and the confrontational. Van Noten chose color, print, texture, and the layered accumulation of cultural references drawn from India, Morocco, Japan, and the European decorative arts — an approach that made him, paradoxically, both the most commercially accessible and the most aesthetically ambitious of the group.

The Spring/Summer 1994 collection crystallized everything that distinguished Van Noten from his Belgian contemporaries and from the broader fashion world of the period. Where Helmut Lang and Jil Sander were stripping fashion to its industrial bones, where Margiela was deconstructing the garment into its conceptual components, Van Noten was layering — embroidered jackets over printed blouses over textured skirts, each surface carrying a different pattern, a different origin, a different history, and all of them somehow cohering into ensembles that looked not chaotic but inevitable, as though the garments had always belonged together despite coming from opposite ends of the earth. The textiles were sourced from workshops in India — a relationship that began in 1989 when Christine Mathys, who managed the company’s commercial expansion until her death in 1999, introduced Van Noten to Indian artisans who practiced block printing, Ikat weaving, sequin embroidery, Kantha stitching, and the Kalamkari technique of hand-painting fabric with natural dyes. The company eventually employed three thousand embroiderers in Indian villages, working by hand for fair wages in a production model that predated the fashion industry’s ethical-sourcing discourse by two decades.

The Passage Brady setting was characteristic — Van Noten’s shows in this period were legendary for their locations and their finales, each one escalating the theatrical stakes: Spring/Summer 1995 would send models cycling through the Palais Royal gardens on vintage bicycles; Spring/Summer 1996 would conclude with fireworks. But the rose petal show of 1994 remains the most celebrated because the gesture was perfectly matched to the clothes: petals falling on fabrics that already contained flowers — printed, embroidered, woven — producing a moment in which the boundary between the garment and the world dissolved, and the collection’s argument — that fashion is not about reduction but about accumulation, not about purity but about the richness that results when different traditions collide and combine — was enacted physically, in real time, on the bodies of the models and in the laps of the audience.

Van Noten’s company was, at the time and for twenty-four years afterward, entirely self-financed — a distinction that separated him from virtually every designer of comparable stature and that shaped his creative decisions in ways that are inseparable from the clothes themselves. He did not sell majority stakes. He did not produce pre-collections. He did not advertise. He did not dress celebrities. He did not chase the handbag market. He made every runway look available for retail, operated from Het Modepaleis — a five-story former department store in Antwerp that he had occupied since 1989 — and built a business that proved fashion could be commercially viable without surrendering creative autonomy to the conglomerates that were, by the mid-1990s, acquiring designer brands with the appetite of empires. It was not until 2018 that he sold a majority stake to the Spanish perfume and fashion group Puig, and even then he retained the role of chief creative officer and chairman. The Spring/Summer 1994 collection, with its Indian textiles and its Belgian tailoring and its Parisian rose petals, was the work of a designer who answered to no one — and the freedom of that position was visible in every garment, in the audacity of the color combinations, in the density of the references, and in the confidence required to end a fashion show by making it rain flowers.