The Kris Van Assche brand is back, baby!
Today, designer Kris Van Assche announced that he is reviving his namesake brand after shuttering it in May of 2015, eight years into his 11 year-tenure as creative director of Dior Homme. Van Assche famously took over at Dior after the departure of Hedi Slimane who reportedly left after negotiations for his own Dior-funded namesake label broke down. Van Assche was then creative director of Berluti from 2018 to 2021 and has designed objects for Serax, bronze sculptures with Downtown Gallery, and collaborations with Anta and Fred Perry.
This time around, though, the Kris Van Assche brand wont just be for the boys. “I graduated in womenswear from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1998, but went on to work almost exclusively in menswear,” said Van Assche in a statement. “The desire to work on womenswear never disappeared. Now seems like the moment to bring both together. In that sense, this is both a return and a beginning.”
Don’t expect a full-fledged runway show just yet, though. Or maybe ever.
“For this project, I wanted to do things differently. Rather than building a large collection only to see it edited down afterwards, I wanted to start with the edit: a concentrated selection of pieces that feel essential to the story,” said Van Assche. “The scale is deliberately intimate. High-quality deadstock fabrics allow for smaller quantities and bring back a certain sense of rarity. Some pieces revisit ideas from the KRISVANASSCHE vocabulary, reworked in new proportions for today, while others are entirely new. Masculine and feminine codes coexist throughout, not as rules about who should wear what, but as contrasts that create tension. I want this project to develop at its own rhythm, rather than follow the traditional calendar. This first collection establishes a vocabulary for him and for her; what follows can take different forms, with new drops when there is genuinely something new to say. Fashion will exist alongside my work in design and other collaborations, all brought together through krisvanassche.com as one creative universe.
“Running through it all is a desire to make something personal and human, at a moment when so much around us feels artificial, retouched and increasingly detached. More than a return to fashion, this feels like a return to why I wanted to make clothes in the first place.”
The brand’s current website doesn’t give much away in terms of aesthetics or direction except that in it’s austerity it looks like we can expect a return to the kind of precise tailoring and subtle details that have always made Van Assche’s clothes such standouts. That’s not a bad thing. But will it be enough in the age of social media spectacle and virality to cut through the noise and translate into actual sales. Time will tell, but we hope so.
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