Introducing Julian Klausner, the Rising Star Behind Dries Van Noten

The year 2025 was an inflection point in contemporary fashion. More than 20 leading labels, including Chanel, Bottega Veneta, and Valentino, welcomed new creative leads. It was an industry-wide reaction to a slowdown in luxury spending and the welcoming of an, in some cases overdue, season of change.

Some of those designers were familiar names, like Jonathan Anderson, who went to Dior from Loewe, or Demna, who left Balenciaga for Gucci (a phenomenon sardonically referred to in the industry as “musical chairs”).

Then there was Julian Klausner, who was promoted to creative director at Dries Van Noten in December of 2024. Klausner, 34, who had spent close to six years as the brand’s head of womenswear, was virtually unknown.

His appointment came at a delicate time for the cult label that Van Noten, a venerated Belgian designer famously known for being part of the much mythologized “Antwerp Six,” founded in 1986. The designer announced his retirement at 65 in March of 2024, sending an industry-wide shockwave. A glorious career was ending, as was an era in fashion, and the future of his widely beloved label was suddenly a question mark.

In many ways, Klausner had the hardest job of them all. He was not only an untested designer whose name was not synonymous with an aesthetic, like, say, Alessandro Michele, who left Gucci and arrived at Valentino. But his role was not to fix a flailing business, but, rather, to keep a roaring flame alive. He was an anomaly in this season of change in part because he had been handpicked by his predecessor, and he would also be tasked with taking on the mantle for a founder-led brand rather than within a conglomerate.

“I did not feel like I was part of the musical chairs, I was here, and I stayed here,” he tells me from his office in Antwerp, “I didn’t feel like part of this big shift.”

Klausner’s fifth show at Dries Van Noten, held Wednesday during Paris Fashion Week, will mark a year of collections under his belt, which have catapulted him from a behind-the-scenes man to one of the industry’s undeniable rising stars. He recalls meeting a critic ahead of his first show: “She said, ‘you have a really tricky position, because I’m here as a reviewer, but I’m also here as a customer,” Klausner recalls. “I was like, ‘okay, no pressure.’”

Each of his collections has been better received than the last. His first women’s show last March was a decisive collection that spoke the same language as Van Noten but welcomed Klausner’s own Millennial vernacular—younger, looser, a little sexier. And his knockout debut men’s show in June, provoked roaring applause from attendees for its earnest joyfulness.

“I felt such a relief after my first women’s show,” Klausner says. He saw the reviews—he reads them all—and realized only after the fact that people were skeptical. “I read that people were relieved and that they had zero expectations,” he says, laughing “Thankfully I hadn’t clocked that while working on the collection.” Then, turning serious, he adds: “I would have never taken on this role if I didn’t feel that I was able, at least to a minimum, carry on the message. I genuinely love the brand, and I genuinely respect Dries.”

Part of that critical scrutiny was prompted by the fact that Van Noten’s collections were known to be deeply personal. “I experienced that even as a customer,” Klausner says. Van Noten’s collections were singular in their eclecticism and polish, but always included a range of wearable, buyable clothes. He never showed something on the runway that he wasn’t ready to put in a store.

“It’s an incredible achievement of Dries, to create a world that is so rich and so varied that makes it really exciting [for me] as a creative to tap into all those different facets,” Klausner says. On the other hand, that represents Klaunser’s biggest challenge: To define what Dries Van Noten is without Dries.

Klausner finds relief in the fact that “maybe people are not questioning it that much.” If they aren’t, that’s to his credit. In just a year, Klausner has dissipated the cloud of doubt that was casting a shadow over Dries Van Noten like a threatening storm.

Now based in Antwerp, Klausner was born in 1991 and raised in Brussels. The youngest of four siblings, he remembers always wanting to be around grown ups. “I hated feeling like the kid,” he says, “though I guess that’s a universal feeling, everybody hates having to go to bed when the adults are staying up.”

This is a recurring element in our conversation. Every time Klausner starts speaking of himself a little too deeply, he relates back his experience to his generation’s, or his team’s, or his fellow designers’. He is humble and generous, funny, and, despite what one would assume from his towering height and handsome looks, and from his love for theater and the fact that he attended some improv workshops early on, a pretty gentle, modest guy. Unlike many other designers of his stature, he seems indifferent to the attention. Appreciative, yes, but not particularly starved for it.

“Julian is wise beyond his years, such a thoughtful and intentional person,” Steff Yotka, the global editorial director at i-D says. “He reminds me of Dries in his appreciation of subtlety and humanity—the exact right jacquard, the perfect polka dot, the ideal wide rib knit. Nothing is forced or unnatural. He makes clothes that you can inhabit with your own spirit. And clothes that flatter so many types of person. I am consistently in awe of how fabulous and yet so humble and generous his collections are.”

Klausner remembers always being the creative child, and “always fiddling with stuff.” “I was lucky, because I guess my parents didn’t know what to do with me over holidays, so they signed me up to a lot of courses,” he says. “They kept me busy.”

He got into fashion early on. His mother got him a small mannequin, which he would often drape on, and he had a “fabulous grandma” from Costa Rica whose sense of elegance he found affecting. She would talk to him about fashion, as would an older cousin who would take him to Antwerp to go visit stores. “Through her I discovered the Ann Demeulemeester store, and the Dries store, and Marc Jacobs,” he says. His parents would also buy him L’Officiel’s tome of fashion collections, and he would watch Tim Blanks on TV when the famed fashion journalist hosted Fashion File in the 2000s. He turned to Style.com, now Vogue Runway, to see fashion collections online.

Eventually he realized that fashion was “a proper job,” and a profession he could properly pursue. He considered universities outside of Brussels, though eventually he settled on La Cambre (formally L’École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre). It was affordable, and familiar. Its graduate shows are open to the public, which Klausner remembers going to as a teenager. He passed its rigorous application process and was accepted. “I learned almost everything there,” he says.

The balance of his education came from internships. First came Stella McCartney in London, which got him out of Brussels for a summer, and then Thom Browne in New York, where he worked under Daniel Roseberry, now the designer at Schiaparelli. Kenzo followed, under Carol Lim and Humberto Leon. “They were so good at branding and image and networking,” he recalls, “it was a great moment to be there.” After completing his final internship at Maison Margiela under John Galliano, he returned to work there.

“There are highs and lows of creative studies because they are both very demanding and vulnerable,” Klausner says. “You have to question and identify yourself, put yourself on the table and justify what you’re showing when you’re 19 or 20.” It’s why his primary advice for students today is to push through the vulnerability, “because that’s what happens for the rest of your life,” Klausner says, “You have to cringe it out.”

For someone who has only been under public scrutiny for a year, Klausner appears remarkably well adjusted. Perhaps because he cringed it out, or because he spent his formative years watching designers speaking on TV and reading show reviews and interviews, he is both a generous interviewee and a measured and considered speaker.

“On a personal level it’s weird because my life hasn’t changed at all,” Klausner says, “same apartment, same workplace, same colleagues and same schedule.” What is new is his sense of responsibility. “My job is making sure that everybody is busy and happy and creatively fulfilled,” he says, “as much as I’m still obsessing over every detail of the collections, that’s not my only responsibility now, I have to let other people step up too.”

There’s also the social adjustment. Many of the people whose work Klausner grew up observing he now knows personally, and they know him. It’s not just designers like Galliano (“my first interview at Margiela was with him, and I was completely tripping out!” he says with a laugh), but also writers that belong to the pantheon of fashion journalism, like Blanks, Suzie Menkes, and Sarah Mower, now write about him. “It’s super weird,” Klausner says, “I guess I will get more and more used to it.” He recalls how, during his first season, his show was written up in the same stories as the two other big debuts of the week, Haider Ackermann’s at Tom Ford and Sarah Burton’s at Givenchy. “To end up in the same article, this was mind blowing to me,” he says, “it’s a huge privilege.”

Klausner found his way to Dries Van Noten almost eight years ago when he received a call about an interview for a position as its head of womenswear.

He remembers the brand as a “mysterious, very discreet house, beautiful, and precious.” They wouldn’t take interns, Klausner says, and he had never met anyone who worked there. He would see the shows on Style.com and watch videos of Van Noten walking through his collections. (He recalls quoting those videos back to Van Noten while working under him with details about archival collections he remembered that the designer sometimes didn’t.) He knew people who would wear the brand religiously, and remembers loving the menswear and becoming a customer.

“I always admired that Dries was able to propose playfulness and daringness, but in a really effortless casual way for men,” he says, “I think for me in the past, as a gay guy, you spend your life exploring with what is allowed or not allowed in terms of masculine wardrobe, and even as a teenager looking at Dries and how he was doing menswear, it felt like him giving permission to me as a customer to allow myself to include that in my wardrobe.”

DVN clothes have a similarly liberating effect on all who buy them. “One of the most difficult things to capture is the cacophony of Dries Van Noten curiosities and references into a collection that still maintains an approachability and nonchalance,” Chloe King, a fashion director and longtime Dries Van Noten customer says. “Julian has already proven a fluency in the instinctual and often counterintuitive color combinations, textures and ideas that makes DVN a destination for maximalists and punctuation mark for more refined dressers. Most importantly, the Dries Van Noten world remains thoughtful and considered—fiercely beloved by fans for the way wearing it makes us feel: empowered, more interesting, but ultimately, like ourselves.”

Once Klausner took the call to interview with Van Noten and his partner in life and business, Patrick Vangheluwe, his fate was sealed. “I had a really nice feeling because it felt very personal,” Klausner says. Two weeks later he was back in Antwerp, and he’s been there since.

Of everything he learned from Van Noten, Klausner says he most values his mentor’s ability to “keep calm and carry on.” “Dries doesn’t waste time being upset or frustrated or with negative energy,” he says. Klausner has learned to embrace mistakes and accidents as part of the creative process. Van Noten would also often remind him that “there are enough more seasons coming” in the future to do things when they’re meant to be.

Vangheluwe taught him to think of his customer, and to be sensitive to how clothes fit into people’s real lives outside of a show. It’s something he’s working on for himself, too.

“I’m here a lot, so my life outside of DVN is a small part,” Klausner says. In his spare time, he makes time for friends and family. He’s a big reader, and enjoys the performing arts, be that the theater or the opera, which he tries to visit as much as he can. (He staged his debut show at the Palais Garnier, Paris’s opera house.) “I just think there’s something inspiring about putting yourself out there on stage,” he says, “I find the courage commendable.”

It’s not all high brow for Klausner though. “I wish I could take more time to watch movies, because in the end I spend two hours on YouTube where I could have just watched a really good movie.”

Except that it’s not about time, but about commitment. “Sometimes I need to be in the right headspace to welcome a whole plot masterpiece of a movie,” he says. He still keeps it classy, following museum channels, and is a fan of Baumgartner Restoration on the platform. He also watches cooking videos, though he says he’s a “better eater than cook.” He likes to improvise rather than meticulously follow recipes, and generally enjoys the process of making something quickly. “I guess because collections take long to make, so there’s just something satisfying about a quick result,” he says.

Klaunser likes to get things right. And he is also game for some healthy competition. “It made me feel like now is the moment to be true to the brand, and to try to find the essence” he says, referring to the ongoing period of change in fashion. “I remember growing up at a time where the houses were so distinct in what they stood for. There are true creatives [installed] in those roles, and we are going to go back to that feeling that each brand has its own story to tell. And I like that people are rooting for each other,” he says, once again placing his experience alongside that of his peers. “I am definitely rooting for people.”

Klausner remains steadfast in his purpose. “I want to make sure that the shows we present have a point of view, and that we are putting something out there that is challenging, interesting, and that you need to think about or look wise or look at twice,” he says. “That’s really what the brand stands for, what Dries stands for.” And a year in, now we know that it’s what Klausner stands for, too.