Luxury Needs Proof
Why Dries Van Noten’s 2016 Opera Garnier show remains my benchmark for what luxury should feel like.
Luxury feels tense right now.
Prices rise, quality wobbles, value is debated in comment sections. The old signals -logos, irony, resale heat - don’t quite hold the way they used to. And as that sheen dulls, something else has quietly come into focus: craft.
It’s interesting that couture now has a genuine audience on social media. What used to be closed-door - the initiated only - is now slowed down, zoomed in, replayed. Beading, pinning, finishing. The hand at work. People aren’t just consuming spectacle, they’re consuming labour. Evidence.
Jonathan Anderson understood that instinctively during his tenure at Loewe -foregrounding material, tactility, the joy of making. His own label, JW Anderson, now drifts happily between clothing, ceramics and gardening tools. The object matters as much as the outfit.
Which has made me think about what would actually make me spend now.
It wouldn’t be irony. I avoided the moment when Balenciaga inflated the deliberately ugly trainer into the stratosphere. I felt no real pull when Miu Miu aestheticised the worn Carhartt jacket. Flash doesn’t hold me. Nostalgia-as-styling doesn’t either.
If I’m honest, the answer takes me back to 2016.
The Show I Wish I’d Seen From the Stage
In 2016, Dries Van Noten staged his Autumn/Winter menswear show at the Palais Garnier - after a fifteen-year campaign to host a show there.
The stage seated the fashion press. The photographer pit was foregrounded. The models - and I don’t use this lightly - formed a battalion in the auditorium.
Military coats emerged in heavy wool and twill. Fur collars. Khaki, black and grey forming a restrained ground. And on top of that: the most exquisite official-style embroidery, gilding, braiding, roping.
Usually those codes celebrate state power, royalty, hierarchy. Here they celebrated the majesty of the clothes themselves.
It felt like a redistribution of pomp.
Where Structure Met Psychedelia
What pushed the collection over the top was the intervention of Wes Wilson.
Typography from the height of the original Summer of Love. Curved faces melting into a kind of romantic haze. That particular art nouveau-meets-Haight-Ashbury language I’ve always had a soft spot for.
The collision shouldn’t have worked - military severity against psychedelic fluidity - but it did.
This is where Dries differs from Raf Simons. Raf has often quoted culture directly - album covers lifted, graphics reproduced. Dries absorbs influence and somehow transforms it. The feeling of the reference remains, but it becomes inseparable from his own vocabulary.
He is an alchemist.
Looking Closer
Not long after the show, I made a pilgrimage to Antwerp to visit the original store - Het Modepaleis, at Nationalestraat 16 - the 19th-century building that has anchored Dries Van Noten since 1989. I bought an embroidered patch T-shirt and an inside-out shirt, constructed like the interior of a tailored jacket, complete with silky ticking lining and exposed pocket panels.
They were clothes that rewarded inspection.
You could see the thought in them.
You could feel the weight.
I was also gifted the books from the collections - the grand menswear volume documenting the Opera Garnier moment, and the womenswear one featuring Gill Button’s atmospheric faces. They sit now as reminders that fashion can still produce artefacts, not just product.
The Footwear
And then there were the boots.
Strapped, kiltied, somewhere between the spirit of John Moore, Prada’s golf shoe and (more recently) Craig Green’s collabs with Grenson. They anchored everything.
Hair, footwear, tailoring - it was total world-building.
Nothing felt accidental.
Before the Applause
The general reaction at the time was awe. A sense of witnessing a moment. I wasn’t on stage to see it in person, but the distance almost intensifies the memory. It remains luminous.
In Motion
Watching the show again restores what still images can’t: the pacing, the echo of boots in the opera house, the procession of coats across velvet seats.
It wasn’t viral. It was cultural.
What Would Make Me Spend Now?
When I see pieces from that collection surface on Vestiaire, Grailed, even eBay, I feel the tug. I also chastise myself for not moving faster when they were plentiful.
But perhaps longing is part of the equation.
If I’m honest, what would make me spend now is simple:
Weight.
Evidence.
Embroidery that took time.
Influence transformed rather than photocopied.
A designer building a universe rather than a moment.
Everything about that AW16 collection felt considered. Believed in.
And in a climate where luxury feels squeezed, belief might be the rarest commodity of all.
When I think about spending - really spending - my mind doesn’t go to hype.
It goes back to an opera house in Paris, a battalion of coats, and the quiet certainty of a designer who believed in what he was making.
And perhaps belief - more than irony, more than exclusivity - is what I’m actually looking to buy.
If You’re Curious
Pieces from AW16 still in circulation - if you’re quicker than I was.
Dries Van Noten AW16 × Wes Wilson Rover Military Coat
Size M — Reversible
🔗 https://www.reversible.com/gb/user/calif/listings/dries-van-noten-aw16-dries-van-noten-x-wes-wilson-rover-military-coat-m-814444748
Dries Van Noten AW16 Embroidered Peacoat
Size 46 — eBay
🔗 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/406674074330
Dries Van Noten Hooded Trench / Parka Coat
Size L — Grailed
🔗 https://www.grailed.com/listings/77542867-dries-van-noten-dries-van-noten-trench-hooded-men-parka-coat-size-l
Dries Van Noten AW16 Embroidered Military Jacket
Size 52 — eBay
🔗 https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/277641600325
So true! This is the the kind of 2016 throwback I want to see more of haha