Fashion is an all-enveloping, multi-faceted, all-consuming thing, and when, for whatever reason, one steps away from it—whether for a brief interlude or a complete change of life—it seems that it’s always still throbbing away, just under the surface. A few years ago, when I was ripped away from fashion—and interiors, and all the things I have most coveted in my life—through a stroke and spent six months in hospitals recovering, slowly, bit by painful bit, what did I turn to? Strangely enough… football. Never have I ever shown the faintest interest in the sport, but now I was gripped, absolutely gripped. Unexpected things happen when life changes. Over the past year or so, we’ve seen a whole new panoply of players in fashion—some 17 new arrivals at storied brands in Paris and Milan, by my count—but for each newcomer, another player has stepped away from the game. What did they turn to? What unexpected things happened to them when fashion was no longer at the center of their lives? And did any of them lose that burning desire to create?
I called around to find out, thinking at the start of designers like Christian Lacroix, the ne plus ultra of 1980s fashion, who left his own house in 2009 to turn to theater design. Brilliantly. Lacroix, oddly, was the first person to tell me about Helmut Lang, who came to define the fashion of the 1990s but left his label in 2005 to focus on making art. Or Rifat Ozbek, whose va-va-voom design work spanned both the ’80s and ’90s before he transferred his immense talents into interiors, including for Maxime’s, Robin Birley’s private club in Manhattan. Francisco Costa left behind 13 years of design work at Calvin Klein to found his own wildly successful sustainable beauty line, Costa Brazil; the list goes on.
When Dries van Noten stepped down in 2024 from the design brand that he had nurtured for almost 40 years, he immediately started another kind of life. (He and his husband, Patrick Vangheluwe, still oversee the shops—in New York and in the recently opened London location in Hanover Square, with its exquisite small Stephen Tennant drawing for which I have long yearned!) When they were initially building their brand they lived in Antwerp, above the shop, so to speak, working every hour that God gave. Some years later they discovered an enchanting columned 1840s country house with some 60 acres around it near Lier, and it became a second part of their lives, occupied as they were with decorating it (with help from Gert Voorjans) and filling it with gardens (by Piet Oudolf and Erik Dhont, among other magicians of the land).
More recently, though, they had been exploring Venice, which has become both the site of their new home and the setting for their foundation. They took on the apartment of the late designer and collector Victoria Press, a place of silvery enchantment in a storied palazzo looking down on the wide canal beneath them. “We loved Venice—it’s really a fantastic city to live in, and interesting too, because you have all the arts, all the exhibitions and the biennials.” Thus inspired, they started to look around for a space that would be “not too big, and not too decorated—and then we found a huge palazzo, and we fell in love!” They bought the 15th century Palazzo Pisani Moretta, with an interior created in the 1730s, to house the Fondazione Dries Van Noten.
Dries is speaking to me from the third and private floor of the palazzo, its stucco work made by an assistant of Tiepolo. “For me, craftsmanship is very broad,” he says, describing the scope of the foundation’s focus. “I want to do a lot of different disciplines—not only ceramics and silver and glass and things like that. Some people use their hands to create ceramics—to express themselves and their feelings. Some people use their voice—they sing, they make music. Other people put their soul in food.”