If you haven't already heard, Vogue launched their "Encyclopedia of Fashion", VOGUEPEDIA. It is a great everything you need to know fashion bible.... The fashion geniuses at Vogue decided to create an online archive of fashion covering the magazine's almost 120 year history. To find out everything there is to know about the designers, models, actors, stylists that have made up the Vogue pages, check out this great resource,
www.vogue.com/voguepedia.
Here are a few images from their site....a favorite designer that I learned a few more tidbits about that I didn't know.
Norman Jean Roy for Vogue, May 2007. “I don’t want to be a big player,”
[1] Dries Van Noten insisted in 2006. Yet he had, in fact, already become one. Rising to prominence in the 1980s, he all but created the mold for the commercially successful independent designer.
Van Noten was one of the Antwerp Six who traveled to London and made a splash in the mid-1980s. In 1985 he established his own label and opened his first boutique in the Belgian fashion capital, and in 1993 he brought his debut women’s collection to Paris. “I was doing something different than other designers,” he explained in 2000. “I showed delicate, fine dresses with rose prints and a rather Indian influence.”
[2]Fabric is usually Van Noten’s starting point, along with a certain trademark exoticism—anything “that reroutes us from the ordinary,”
[3] to use his words. “I’m known for color and prints and embroideries,” he told
Vogue in 2007. “Normally the more clashing it is, the more that I like it!”
[4]The humble yet resourceful Belgian’s career followed a steadily onward-and-upward trajectory before he paused for breath around 2000
...more
Dries Van Noten born in Antwerp, Belgium. His father will run upscale fashion boutiques. “My childhood was very, very, very, very traditional,”
[7] he later tells the
International Herald Tribune. Dries will attend a Jesuit school, and the Van Noten kids will go to Mass identically dressed.
The Van Noten family moves to the suburbs.
Dries works in his father’s shop and attends fashion shows with him.
Begins fashion design studies at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
Starts his own line with business partner Christine Mathys. Shortly after, opens his first boutique in an Antwerp shopping arcade. “To survive financially, I was designing six commercial collections by day and my own label by night,”
[8] he later tells
Vogue.
Shows his menswear collection in London alongside the rest of the Antwerp Six. Barneys New York buys his menswear line to sell to women, requesting that he add some skirts.
Patrick Vangheluwe, his life partner, joins the company.
Van Noten moves his boutique into Het Modepaleis, an 1881 redbrick atelier that once housed the shop of his tailor grandfather’s rival.
Stages his first menswear show in Paris. An Vandevorst becomes his first assistant. (She will work with him for six years and then launch A. F. Vandevorst with her mentor’s moral and financial support.)
Van Noten starts a childrenswear line; it will be short-lived.
Moves his operations into a six-story converted shipping warehouse.
Honored at the Fashion Group International’s 20th anniversary Night of Stars gala; Van Noten wears a waistcoat from the late-1800s with a tuxedo of his own design.
To celebrate 20 years in business and his 50th show, publishesDries Van Noten 01-50.
Opens his first Paris boutique on the Left Bank, in a former bookstore on the Quai Malaquais. Among the many bibelots in the homey shop is a bridge table that once belonged to bon vivant Charles de Beistegui.
January: Kate Hudson wears Dries Van Noten for the cover ofVogue. June: He receives the CFDA International Award.
March: Awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. May: Accepts the Artistry of Fashion Award from the Couture Council of the Museum at F.I.T.
May: Is invited to preside over the 25th edition of the Festival International de Mode et de Photographie of Hyères, France.
"What Paris Fall 2010 Taught Us Today: Dries Van Noten"by Mark HolgateMarch 4, 2010
"Paris Spring 2010: The Definitive Look at Dries Van Noten"by Sally SingerOctober 5, 2009