Belgium’s Van Noten sends out quirky schoolboy looks paired with luxuriant longjohns

Van Noten delivers quirky schoolboys in longjohns

PARIS — Globe-trotting designer Dries Van Noten deftly combined far-flung fabrics for a hybrid fall-winter 2010-2011 menswear look that managed to be chic, despite being equal parts naughty English schoolboy and couch potato.

Van Noten — an affable Belgian whose eye for quirky color combinations and penchant for madcap pairings of bold prints has made him a critical darling — soldered fine tweed sleeves onto sweat shirts and paired longjohns with classic sportscoats emblazoned with college crests.

Many of the jackets and double-breasted coats looked as if they’d been the victims of a schoolboy’s prank: Their sleeves had their sleeves hacked off to reveal shoulderpads beneath.

“I wanted to play with tradition, but in a very young way,” Van Noten told The Associated Press in a backstage interview. “When you want to play with menswear, you always have to do it with a bit of tradition, otherwise it becomes ridiculous.”

Always the magpie, Noten said he’d drawn inspiration from vintage ties, sending out trench coats and tapered, cropped trousers in vertically striped prints originally taken from the cravats from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

Noten said he’d sourced another of the collection’s dominant fabrics, fine Harris tweeds, from traditional weavers in Scotland.

“When you showed the models pictures of the little old ladies weaving the (tweed) fabrics on an island off the north of Scotland, they were amazed and were like ‘is this something that still exists?’” he said.