When I watched the Style.com video above of Dries Van Noten’s Spring 2012 runway show I “oooohhed” and “ahhhhed” aloud over the phenomenal city-scape prints. I enrolled in metropolitan planning as an elective during my graduate program, a class I greatly enjoyed. I am obsessed with cities and urban landscapes. I attribute that to my childhood in New York and subsequent adolescence in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which allowed me to daydream about city-scapes for nine years. When something is familiar yet distant, as cities became to me as I grew up, there is a sense of fascination that develops in its absence. Brief trips to Chicago and New York as a teenager only whetted my thirst for the urban lifestyle. It is in that context that my deep and abiding love for the city grew, and nothing was more enchanting to me than the way a city looks at night. To say that the night sky of a metropolis is magical would be the understatement of the century. It is the representation of humanity’s collective ability to dream into existence a luminescent artificial landscape. The physical environment of a city, literally glowing with energy, embodies the collective ability of engineers and architects to marry ideas to reality. What better source of inspiration for a fashion designer seeking to clothe the modern woman?

 

Van Noten used pictures of nightime cityscapes taken by noted photographer James Reeve and applied them to impeccably tailored tops and dresses. Elevating conceptual fashion even further, he used what looked to be Swarovski crystals in a grid-like smattering across a skirt, echoing the imagery of Reeve’s work. For me, this collection was everything I could have dreamed of for a fashionable yet work-appropriate wardrobe. The result was a spectacular opus to the modern urban woman, a collection of highly wearable but magnificent clothing.