Curated by Pamela Golbin

Two decades ago, Pamela Golbin became curator of fashion and textiles at Les Arts Décoratifs, and when “Dries Van Noten” opens at the Parisian institution this March, it will be one of her few shows of a designer’s work that includes not a stitch of couture. The reason is easy: Dries Van Noten doesn’t do couture. Nor does he make conceptual, Icarusian showpieces à la Hussein Chalayan or Margiela. Instead, at fifty-five, the Belgian designer is cult-worshipped for a lush but grounded sensibility that defies an old argument: that fashion’s unwearable and unpurchasable moments are proof of its art. Nearly every piece in the exhibition was first made in multiple, for sale, elevating (if you stretch it a little) gift-shop populism to the hushed upper floors. Meanwhile, Van Noten’s summer 2014 women’s and men’s collections feature centuries-old prints from the museum’s archive, applied to lounge-like garments that function, you could say, as rather expensive postcards.

— Sarah Nicole Prickett