Len Lye Inspires Belgian Designer Dries Van Noten

Antwerp designer Dries Van Noten’s Spring/Summer 2021 collection was partly inspired by New Zealand-born filmmaker and artist, Len Lye. Van Noten was struck by the inventiveness of Lye’s oeuvre, UK-based AnOther editor-in-chief Susannah Frankel reports.

“When I first saw his films, I thought they could have been made in the 60s and 70s – psychedelia – but, in fact, it was in the 20s, 30s and 40s,” Noten said.

So piqued was the designer’s interest by Lye’s experimental movies – and later by his essays and his mobiles: he was among the earliest practitioners of kinetic sculpture or, as the artist himself put it, “the art of movement” – that Van Noten got in touch with the Len Lye Foundation and looked further, Frankel writes.

The idea of projection harks back to the Len Lye archive – and all the prints in the collection spring from frames in his films – so too do entire texts sprawling across a plain white shift, say, in Lye’s own hand.

Original article by Susannah Frankel, AnOther, September 30, 2020.

Photo by Viviane Sassen.