Recently I had the pleasure of doing a project with the iconic department store of cool, Barneys NY. I was given the delicious assignment of choosing any designer in the store and styling an exclusive head-to-toe look. Then I was to take two pieces from the look and style it with anything else in the store. My first thought, before I even browsed the store, was that I wanted to choose Dries van Noten, I did not even think it, I just knew it. I surprised even myself.

Lately when I have gone into that store, and I do often, in the corner of my eye I started to notice Dries. For the last few seasons I have included him in the runway picks for my Weekend Fashion Bibliography. Last year he begins to appear in my Pinterest boards. I have announced his upcoming documentary. I wore his coat in a dream and his garments have danced around the edges of my awareness. I keep feeling the pull of them. It is similar to the deep attraction I felt for Gucci when the collection evoked images of bespectacled nerdy girls who still managed to be cool or when Prada showed a parade of traveling women. They were clothes I wanted because they somehow felt right for the life I was living at the time. They conveyed something about me. The stuff of clothes, life, dreams and reality.

My Dries dream tells me there is an “unthought known” about this designer that resonates with the life I am starting to live now. Yet until very recently I have not worn his clothes. So I decided to start doing some research and write a post about him for next Monday as a way to explore the architecture of my dream. Moments later the news that he had just shown his 100th collection in Paris popped up on my screen. The celebration: Ageless Beauty. Stay tuned.

Did you ever feel a garment was beckoning you?