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. 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, soundtracked models walking out 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, there were little party treats waiting, in the form of polka dots, some diffused and jacquarded onto 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 the way he gave some of his tailoring funky puzzle piece seams, which can be left open or slide 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.
