Julian Klausner Is Solving Fashion's Impossible Succession Problem

Julian Klausner's Spring 2027 collection suggests continuity may have been seriously undervalued.

Fashion has developed a very particular ritual around the departure of a major designer. The old era ends, an incoming creative director is announced, the archive is opened and within months we are promised a transformation. Logos change. Stores change. Campaigns change. The debut arrives under suffocating expectations to demonstrate exactly how different everything is going to be. In an industry increasingly impatient for immediate results, creative succession has become another form of spectacle.

Dries Van Noten did something considerably quieter. When the founder stepped down as creative director in 2024, the house did not recruit the most famous available designer or announce an aggressive reinvention. It promoted Julian Klausner, who had joined the company in 2018, worked closely alongside Van Noten and eventually became head of the womenswear studio. He already knew the team, the process and the peculiar combination of colour, print, textile, embellishment and unexpected styling that had made the house distinctive.

Almost two years into that transition, the decision is beginning to look unusually smart. Vogue described Klausner's Spring 2027 collection as his strongest yet and suggested the handover may be among the smoothest of fashion's recent creative-director upheaval. That is significant not because Klausner has successfully reproduced Dries Van Noten, but because he increasingly appears comfortable enough to stop trying to prove that he can.

Perhaps fashion has been thinking about succession backwards. The objective may not be to find somebody capable of replacing an important founder. It may be to find somebody who understands the house well enough that replacing him is no longer the assignment.

FASHION HAS BECOME ADDICTED TO THE NEW ERA

There are good reasons houses recruit outsiders. A struggling brand can benefit enormously from disruption, particularly when its existing identity has become commercially irrelevant or creatively exhausted. An incoming designer can expose possibilities that decades of internal thinking have made difficult to see, and some of fashion's greatest appointments have succeeded precisely because the designer arrived with no intention of behaving like the person before them.

But disruption has gradually become fashion's default response to succession rather than one option among several. The arrival of a creative director is increasingly expected to function like a corporate relaunch, even when the house being inherited was not obviously broken.

The pressure this creates is enormous. A designer's first collection must simultaneously demonstrate respect for an archive and prove independence from it. It needs enough familiar codes to reassure existing customers while generating enough novelty to justify the appointment. The industry then begins assessing the entire experiment after approximately fifteen minutes of runway.

That model is particularly awkward when the departing designer is also the founder. Taking over Dior or Gucci means inheriting an institution that has already survived multiple creative identities. Taking over Dries Van Noten means putting your own ideas beneath another living designer's name, one that remained synonymous with a remarkably consistent personal vision for almost four decades.

Klausner's advantage was that he did not need to learn the language before deciding how to change it. He had already been speaking it.

CONTINUITY IS NOT THE SAME THING AS IMITATION

The obvious danger of an internal promotion is creative obedience. If the successor has spent years working beneath the founder, there is always a possibility that preservation becomes the entire project. A house can continue producing technically accomplished versions of what customers already know until continuity quietly becomes nostalgia.

Spring 2027 is convincing because Klausner increasingly avoids that trap.

The collection began with an idea of glamour, but not the remote, immaculate glamour of a woman permanently dressed for an occasion. Klausner imagined an actress leaving a film set and returning to ordinary life, carrying fragments of her character into the street. He and his studio invented vintage-style movies that had never existed, complete with titles such as Lacquer and Lace, Vipère and Ruffle Her Feathers, then printed their fictional posters across trenches, dresses, tops and skirts.

Around them came the things the house has always done exceptionally well: print against print, embellishment against everyday clothing, unexpected colour, slightly strange layering and the ability to make something extravagant look as though somebody simply happened to throw it on. Embroidered jackets met shirts and skirts, sequins appeared over casual layers, brooches transformed ordinary pieces and a single glove could provide just enough theatricality to change the character of an outfit. Klausner described the starting point as the innocent desire to feel glamorous simply because you want to.

None of this requires pretending the founder's influence has disappeared. It would be bizarre if it had. Colour, textile, print and the collision between refinement and eccentricity are fundamental to the identity customers associate with Dries Van Noten. Klausner's success lies in understanding that inheriting those instincts does not require preserving their exact expression. He is maintaining the grammar while gradually changing what he wants to say with it.

THE NAME ON THE LABEL MAKES THIS HARDER

There is a tiny detail in the collection that says almost everything about the transition. Klausner's fictional movie posters contain credits, and hidden among them is his own name. When Vogue pointed this out during a preview, Klausner acknowledged how strange it felt after years of seeing Dries's name everywhere.

It is easy to understand why. Unlike a designer entering a house named after somebody who died decades ago, Klausner is working beneath the name of the man who trained him, employed him and remains involved with the company. Dries Van Noten stepped down from creative direction, but he did not disappear from the institution bearing his name.

That creates an unusual challenge of authorship. Klausner needs to make the collections his own without behaving as though the previous 38 years require correction. Too much reverence and he becomes a caretaker. Too much deliberate rupture and the house risks losing precisely the character he was promoted to understand.

The fictional credits offer a surprisingly elegant metaphor for where he appears to be now. The clothes still say Dries Van Noten on the label, but Klausner is becoming comfortable putting his own name inside the story.

MAYBE THE QUIET HANDOVER DESERVES MORE ATTENTION

Fashion rarely celebrates succession when nothing explodes. A chaotic appointment produces months of speculation, campaigns, deleted Instagram grids and breathless debate about whether the designer has understood the archive. A successful internal promotion can look almost uneventful by comparison.

That may be exactly why the Dries Van Noten transition deserves attention. There was no need for Klausner to spend his first season publicly dismantling the house in order to demonstrate authorship. He could begin with an existing understanding of its customers, studio and creative habits, then allow his differences to emerge through the work. His first collections naturally carried more of the anxiety of inheritance. With Spring 2027, the balance appears to be shifting. The house still feels recognizable, but Klausner increasingly feels responsible for why.

This is not necessarily a succession model every fashion house should copy. An internal appointment only works when there is somebody internally capable of becoming more than the guardian of the previous designer's ideas. Some brands genuinely require disruption, and familiarity can produce complacency just as easily as understanding.

But fashion's recent obsession with external star appointments has perhaps made the opposite possibility look less ambitious than it really is. Deep institutional knowledge can be creative capital. Continuity can provide the confidence required for experimentation rather than preventing it. A designer who already understands why something works has more freedom to decide which parts no longer need protecting.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO KILL THE OLD ERA TO START A NEW ONE

Spring 2027 feels important because Klausner no longer seems caught between demonstrating loyalty and proving independence. The glamour is his. The imaginary films are his. The eccentric characters inhabiting the clothes increasingly belong to his version of the house, even while the colour, craft and instinctive layering remain connected to everything that came before.

That is a much more sophisticated form of succession than fashion's preferred language of rupture allows. A house does not always need to destroy an identity before creating another one. Sometimes the most durable transition happens gradually enough that the audience barely notices where inheritance ends and authorship begins.

Dries Van Noten did not find someone who could replace Dries Van Noten. The house promoted someone who already understood why replacing him was never really the point. Now Julian Klausner is doing the harder thing: making continuity feel like progress.