Light and Air in Dries Van Noten's SS27 Collection Julian Klausner is the best thing to happen to the brand since its founder

Given the often peculiar nature of the clothes seen on the runways in Milan and Paris, one sometimes forgets that the collections of this fashion month are about spring and summer. And those looking at those looks often struggle to picture the summer season. But today, at Dries Van Noten, summer was felt in full. A Belgian summer, cardigan-weather, no beaches or sunshine, yet still steeped in a lightness and a series of muted but vivid colours that became the mechanism around which the show's mechanism was built.

The most beautiful part of the show was that every individual design on display was recognisable on its own, yet when viewed as part of a complete look and then, more broadly, as part of the show as a whole, they created a kind of dreamlike vortex of colour in which the nature of each individual piece seemed to dissolve — a whirlpool of sensory stimuli that, if you'll forgive the expression, had the same energy as a refined cup of tea into which someone had dripped lysergic acid. To quote Rimbaud, we might describe this show as «a long, immense and deliberate derangement of all the senses».

Several designs bore traces of the 1950s, both in their construction and silhouette and in their decoration, featuring a series of prints resembling fake film posters of the era, at least one of which (the final look) referenced the brand's Raving Rose fragrance. Beyond that, every inch of their surface was a meccano of colours, techniques and embellishments that left not a single scrap of fabric unadorned. The great leitmotif of the collection was jewel appliqués — at times crystalline, at times metallic, at times reminiscent of those old-fashioned yet so precious earrings.

There were also cascades of coloured sheerness, and plays of texture between dense fabrics and satin ones. The styling work alone — the pairing of so many varied pieces with their different colours in a state of such studied yet stunning dissonance — is already something of a masterstroke. A particularly interesting device behind many of the looks was the use of a striped top as a base: striped tank tops, a long t-shirt draped over a skirt and pinned at the waist with a brooch, numerous polo shirts with raised collars onto which further layers of hyper-decorated garments were progressively stacked, creating a strange, mind-clouding effect of alienation. The richness of colour and the sensory charge of every detail were truly total, yet without causing the whole to lose any of its lightness and airiness.

In any case, the most eloquent commentary on this Dries Van Noten show is the looks themselves: there is no point discussing them, and it is far better to see them for oneself in all their honest and cerebral exuberance. Julian Klausner may be on the verge of revealing himself as a generational talent, whose sense of colour, fabric and silhouette is so spontaneous and immediate, so authentically his own, as to seem like the fruit of the most daring avant-garde. And the result is a fashion that truly needs no show notes, no concept, no archive deep-dives. You only need to see it to recognise it for what it is: extraordinary.