Chinese style: Dries Van Noten Fall 2012

I really like the Dries Van Noten this season products, he perfectly to apply Chinese elements on clothing，like the easy yet structured tailoring, ethnic prints, a touch of handcraft and embellishment.

Van Noten said he’d recently taken a trip to the Victoria and Albert in London—specifically, to the museum’s holdings of decorative arts and costumes of the world—for print inspiration. He photographed costumes and textiles from China, Japan, and Korea, chopped up the images, and placed them, in patches, on silk mid-length dresses, blouses, and his signature jackets and coats. Goldthread embroidery of birds in flight or dragons was worked into some of the outerwear—half the torso and a sleeve, maybe—in a way that leaves the options open for the pieces to be worn for day or night.

Fluid silks and sharp tailoring led the way - this, after all, is a designer who is known for his masterful approach to mixing - and spanned the sartorial gamut of flowing skirts and tapered trousers to gently oversized tunics and sharply-cut jackets whose shoulder shaped into peaks and whose collars curved to a swift slice. They came with eagle and tapestry prints or with gold patterns swirling out upon them.

But there was a chinoiserie influence to the print that came later, and this continued through to modern details such as the riff on obi belts that were actually elasticated and fastened with Velcro - they came on the dresses and the jackets and the coats, some boasting shoulders overshadowed with fur.

Ordinary people’s costume in Qing dynasty.