Dries Van Noten still remembers the first time he heard Suicide’s “Dream Baby Dream,” a protopunk lullaby from the late ’70s, with singer Alan Vega’s nihilist stacatto over synths and sugary
xylophone taps. “The whole record was so amazing,” he said in a Zoom interview last week. “It was so new, it was so different,” with its “really mantra-type of repetition of sounds,” that he knew it would stay with him for the rest of his life.
The song provides the soundtrack for Van Noten’s Fall 2022 men’s show, released in a video and series of images (both were captured by Casper Sejerson, who was also behind the women’s Fall 2021 show that was one of the best digital fashion efforts during this seemingly never-ending pandemic nightmare). In a lovely empty Paris mansion, mussy-haired models in fluid tailored clothes cling to and kiss each other, throwing their heads thrown back in ecstasy, or shooting sensitive poet gazes in a gray-lit room. “With everything that’s happening in the world, I think we really need more dreams,” Van Noten said. “We have to dream for a different reality, that future reality—[which is] let’s hope really soon—but we wanted to have that kissing, the touching, the tenderness, all those things which we are missing now so much also. And you’re not going out, I can imagine—of course, I have my partner—but I can imagine for young kids how hard it has to be that they are not able to go to discotheques and to look at each other and to grab each other and to kiss each other.”
Other designers have been talking about this message, of forfeited youth and our longing for connection, for almost two years now. Mostly it hasn’t really worked for me, in part because it seems obvious, but also because it seems funny to look at a fashion brand for moral instruction. (Although of course fashion’s easiest lever to pull is fantasy, and that’s all our post-covid future seems to be!) Anyway, I suppose all pop culture is about moral instruction now, or at least it sees its role as offering a sort of churchlike guidance: how to behave, how to look, the “right” way to feel and think. It’s strangely Victorian.