Julian Klausner Is Bringing Joy Back to Fashion
4 min read“I feel really at home here,” says Julian Klausner. He’s speaking not just about the office he’s currently occupying, but something much more symbolic. At the end of 2024, he took over at the house of Dries Van Noten as creative director—after working there for six years as a womenswear designer. We’re speaking a few days before the anniversary of the announcement, so he’s been reflecting on year one.
Julian Klausner
Slight, in a navy sweater, the 34-year-old designer is given to knitting his brow and making careful pronouncements, often bookended by the words, “Let’s say.…” But his work projects a confidence that has won him critical acclaim over just a few short seasons. He is also something increasingly rare in the never-more-in-flux fashion industry: an in-house hire who had the chance to absorb the essence of the brand and shape its vision before becoming its leader. In his new role, “the creative approach is quite different,” he says. When he was working as Van Noten’s right hand on the women’s collections, “I felt that my role was to expand the world of DVN, challenge him, show him what the brand could be in different facets, and we had a lot of fun playing with that.”
Backstage at Dries Van Noten’s spring/summer 2026 show.
From his first collection, Klausner had his work cut out for him: He would be leading a beloved house with the kind of following that spills well outside fashion-insider borders, not to mention one that had been designed by the same person for nearly 40 years. “Before, it was about opening up,” he says, “and now it’s more about making it a bit more focused.”
Colorful patterns dominated the spring/summer 2026 collection.
Klausner grew up in Belgium, a country whose fashion designer-to-general population ratio must be one of the highest around. Despite its Lilliputian size, it’s produced geniuses like Martin Margiela, Raf Simons, and Ann Demeulemeester. Klausner attended La Cambre in Brussels, where he earned his B.A. and M.A.; the current designers of Chanel (Matthieu Blazy) and Saint Laurent (Anthony Vaccarello) are also alums. Post-graduation, Klausner worked at Kenzo and Maison Margiela before starting at the house in 2018.
More models backstage.
For his fall 2025 womenswear debut, Klausner took to Paris’s mirror-filled Opéra Garnier for an assured, craft-centric collection incorporating colorful tassels and eye-catching braiding. He followed that up with a spring 2026 menswear show that played with mixed prints and sequins. While he hadn’t intended for the collection to project optimism per se, he was gratified that people took it that way. “It was inspiring to see that a show can ignite these kinds of emotions in people. We don’t always think about that, but what we do here can have that ripple effect and bring a bit of joy.” He wanted to build on that mood, he says, with the women’s collection that same season, for which he looked to the ease of surf style. He was hoping to channel “a certain relaxedness—being in sync with nature, cruising the waves, feeling the breeze,” though it was more of a romantic ideal; Klausner hastens to note he’s not a surfer himself. “We thought about how the ’60s are such a defining era for this optimistic energy, and the way people were dressing: simple shapes, but all about print and color and a certain boldness. There was a daringness, a desire to present yourself in a joyful way.” To the strains of a reworked Philip Glass soundtrack, models first emerged on the runway in muted tones and tiny dotted patterns. As the show went on, Klausner says, “The colors got brighter and the motifs got bigger, and we ended on 5 to 10 bold silhouettes of these oversize blown-up shapes.” Color, he notes, “is a big part of what we do here. I don’t know if there’s a Belgian-ness about it. There is a lack of color here in the winter; we are quite a gray country.”
The brand’s New York store.
While brightness and ornament have long been standbys for the brand, Klausner’s own enthusiasm shines through in his interpretation. “Dries’s work was always very personal,” he notes. “It’s Dries the brand, but Dries the man as well. And I think that there’s something special in that dialogue that he, through the collections, would have with the customer.” When Klausner started his tenure, “I thought the only way that this transition could work would be to make it as personal as Dries did.” He takes that stewardship seriously, filling in the gaps in the archive and collaborating with longtime employees, some of whom have been there for almost 30 years. “A fashion house is also a home,” the designer says. “This is the home that we have to take care of.”
This story appears in the March 2026 issue of ELLE.