Dries Van Noten’s new London store is an eclectic, art-filled haven

This past March, in the gilded salons of Paris’ Opéra Garnier, Dries Van Noten marked a new chapter under creative director Julian Klausner, the successor to the Belgian house’s namesake founder, who departed the brand in 2024 after 38 years at the helm. A longtime member of the house’s design team, Klausner came with Van Noten’s blessing. ‘I went towards things I always loved,’ he said after the show, which saw Klausner imagine his protagonist dashing through the Opéra grabbing opulent swathes of fabric and wrapping them around her body. ‘Dries wanted me to feel the freedom of doing it alone.’

Now, the brand’s new chapter continues to unfold in London with the opening of a new store on Hanover Square in Mayfair. Taking over a former bank – and once the London residence of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the 18th-century French diplomat and statesman – the 270 sq m space is an eclectic, art-filled haven where shoppers can find the house’s menswear, womenswear and accessories collections, as well as olfactory and beauty. (Van Noten continues to lead the beauty line, for which he draws inspiration from his 55-acre garden in Lier, just outside of Antwerp.)

Inside Dries Van Noten’s new London store

Spread across two floors – a ground level dedicated to the womenswear collections and a more intimate basement space focusing on the men’s collection – the store is interspersed with an array of artworks, design objects and furniture (during his near-four-decades at the brand, Van Noten forged close links with the art world, as well as noting inspiration from figures spanning John Everett Millais, Elizabeth Peyton, Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, among others). The brand says the idea is to have a space for ‘discovery’, imagining shoppers traversing the store as they might in an art gallery.

Art highlights of the unique collection include a pair of David Hockney lithographs from 1979, ‘Celia Weary’ and ‘Celia - Elegant’, depicting fashion designer and muse Celia Birtwell; a Man Ray etching ‘La Main Bleue’ (1971); Tracey Emin’s ‘Be Faithful to Your Dreams (1999), an embroidered cotton handkerchief, and a Vladimir Slavov ‘Labia’ chandelier, alongside works by Gilbert Jackson, William Waterhouse and Mario Schifano. As for furniture, the space features Ron Arad’s ‘Rover P6’ chairs from the 1980s, Jules and André Leleu’s La Ligne L Series ‘President’ desk, and an antique Chinese paravent.

The store is completed by a ‘Vinyl Corner’, a rotating selection of vintage and contemporary vinyl – a nod, the brand says, to its long-standing relationship with music, having produced some of fashion’s most memorable runway soundtracks.

Dries Van Noten London store opens today (10 April 2025), 21 Hanover Square, London W1S 1JW.

driesvannoten.com