Dries Van Noten Is Turning iPhone Photos Into Clothes

Dries Van Noten came into the pandemic guns blazing, making a bold call last spring for the fashion system to fully rewire itself. More than a year later, it seems, he’s taking things more moment by moment. Speaking after showing his Spring 2022 collection, I asked what he feels has changed for him over the past year. He said everyone gained a new appreciation of intimacy: “We discovered how precious it can be to see just one person.” And it’s true that everything has gotten more personable—designers from Jonathan Anderson to Thom Browne have been feeling that, too, and the idea animated Van Noten’s Spring 2022 collection. “It’s the first collection where you really feel [that] the starting point was being in lockdown,” he said. “When I started to talk to my creative team about the collection, the word we were always using was ‘outburst’—outburst of joy and fun.” Read more at GQ.