Gardens & Creativity – Dries Van Noten
I first came across Dries Van Noten's work early in my fashion career, and it's stayed with me ever since, that fearless clash of print on print, colour against colour, in a way that somehow always flatters the woman wearing it. He designs for how a woman sees herself, not how she's seen. It turns out his garden is built on exactly the same instinct.
Photographed by François Halard, Vogue, March 2014
Dries Van Noten has lived for over two decades at Ringenhof, a moated 1840s estate near Antwerp, with his partner Patrick Vangheluwe. He grew up around flowers, his father loved roses and had him working in the family garden as a boy, and for years he kept the two loves separate, fashion in one room of his life and gardening in another. They've since become impossible to untangle.
Erik Dhont's zigzagging yew. Photograph: Elspeth Diederix
The garden was laid out by landscape architect Erik Dhont and unfolds in distinct rooms rather than one single view, woodland, a rose and dahlia garden, clipped yew hedging, a wildflower meadow, and a long allée that leads down to the lake. Nothing sits still for long. Witch hazel opens around Christmas, cyclamen follow in January, then the rhododendrons take over by May, and by summer the borders run riot with peonies, geraniums, lupins and poppies in every clashing shade he'd happily put on a runway.
Photographed by François Halard, Vogue, March 2014
What we love most is that it isn't tidy. The planting is loose, layered and a little overgrown by design, closer to a romantic wilderness than a manicured show garden. Van Noten has said the two of them spend most weekends there simply working the beds themselves, and that a garden can't be art-directed the way a collection can, it has to be lived with, season by season, mistake by mistake. It's the same instinct that runs through his clothes, just working in petals instead of silk.
Some of the best things we grow, we don't fully choose. We just keep showing up for them.
D
