Dries Van Noten Opens a Fondazione in Venice
The Belgian fashion designer expands his vision of craft-led experimentation with a new multidisciplinary exhibition space rooted in the past, present, and future of its storied surroundings.
Dries Van Noten has always taken an experimental approach in his ready-to-wear collections, challenging conventions of form and function with a strong focus on reimplemented age-old craft techniques. It’s a balancing act—an unabashed shaping of, rather than response to, trends—the revered talent has long applied and mastered.
Van Noten was a key member of The Antwerp Six, a group of radical fashion designers that emerged from the city’s influential Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the mid 1980s. Entrepreneur Geert Bruloot helped mount the fledgling talents’ first showing during the 1986 edition of London Fashion Week, and from there Van Noten went on to create his inaugural menswear collection and secure a small order from Barneys New York. He hung up his shears in March 2024, saying at the time, “my dream was to have a voice in fashion. That dream came true. Now, I want to shift my focus to all the things I never had time for,” and handed over the reins of the globally celebrated brand to fellow Belgian wunderkind Julian Klausner.
From fashion into a wider creative sphere, the opening of the Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Venice this spring marks a new chapter in the designer’s ever-curious practice. Here, Van Noten extends his instinct for juxtaposition beyond the runway by placing a typologically diverse array of collected historical pieces from his archive in conversation with collectible art and design objects from a wide range of contemporary talents. Beside the Grand Canal, Palazzo Pisani Moretta—one of La Serenissima’s most emblematic addresses—forms the atmospheric backdrop to Fondazione Dries Van Noten.
Built in the 15th century and reimagined in the 18th, the interiors unfold as a study in Venetian rococo exuberance. The grand piano nobile reception rooms are frescoed by artists including Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Jacopo Guarana, Gaspare Diziani, and Giuseppe Angeli. Gilded reliefs—asymmetrical floral and fruit motifs—play off of intricately inlaid S and C curve parquetry flooring and fantastical, trompe l’oeil plafond ceilings.
The inaugural exhibition The Only True Protest Is Beauty—curated in collaboration with Bruloot—reframes beauty as something far more charged than surface appeal. The exhibition brings together internationally recognized talents such as Ann Carrington, Kaori Kurihara, Misha Kahn, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Peter Buggenhout, and emerging Palestinian fashion designer Ayham Hassan. Their works are shown alongside archival garments by Christian Lacroix and Comme des Garçon’s Rei Kawakubo. For Dries Van Noten, this exhibition perhaps is less a statement than a question: what does it mean to choose beauty today?
