Kris Van Assche Is Back, but He’s Keeping Things Personal This Time
Images via Kris Van Assche
Kris Van Assche is bringing his namesake label back after closing it in 2015. Fashion loves a dramatic comeback, but this one feels more intimate and thoughtful than most.
The Belgian designer is returning with clothing for both men and women, offered in small quantities through his revived website. He plans to use high quality deadstock fabrics, so the amount of available material will determine how many pieces can be made. It is a practical setup that also says plenty about where his head is now. Van Assche does not appear interested in flooding the market or chasing an exhausting release schedule. He is building a focused wardrobe at a pace he can control. That gives him room to follow each idea properly and stay close to the clothes. This is not simply an old company reopening its doors after eleven years. It is a designer returning to a conversation he had to leave unfinished when running an independent label alongside Dior Homme became too difficult to maintain.
The amusing part is that many of Van Assche’s original ideas no longer look unusual. Fashion spent the years after his label closed quietly absorbing them until they became part of everyday style. When the brand began in 2005, wearing sneakers with a narrow suit still carried a slight sense of rebellion. Wool trousers with elastic waists, shirts made from unlikely combinations and sock shaped shoes also felt genuinely new. Today, versions of that entire vocabulary can be found almost everywhere, from luxury boutiques to ordinary shops at the mall. It is easy to forget that somebody had to make those combinations feel believable before they became familiar. Van Assche was never the loudest designer in the room, so his influence arrived gradually and settled into the culture without much fuss. That makes his return especially interesting. He cannot simply pull a few ideas from the archive and expect them to carry the same energy. He now has to reconsider a design language that the rest of fashion has spent a decade borrowing.
He is also returning as a more expansive designer than the person who stepped away from the label. Van Assche spent eleven years leading Dior Homme and later three years at Berluti. It was an extraordinary run, but that level of responsibility can turn creativity into a cycle of meetings, deadlines and corporate expectations. Since leaving Berluti in 2021, he has designed vases and other objects for Serax, created bronze sculptures with Downtown Gallery and returned to clothing through projects with Fred Perry and Anta. Each collaboration gave him a different material, audience and set of rules to explore. He also worked on a book covering his fifty five collections. Looking back helped him realize that his creative identity had remained remarkably consistent. Whether he was cutting a jacket, shaping a vase or reworking a polo shirt, he kept returning to proportion, texture, volume and restraint. His revived website will gather all these projects in one place. It will present him as a complete designer rather than a famous name defined forever by the luxury houses on his résumé.
The clearest clue to the mood of this return might be one of its first teaser images. It shows a rose stem tied with a ribbon carrying the words “write more love letters.” The message could easily feel too sweet, but it makes perfect sense in Van Assche’s world. Flowers have followed him for years, and he has said that he might have become a florist if fashion had not worked out. The rose therefore feels less like an invented campaign symbol and more like a genuine piece of his life entering the work. It also suggests that this return is being driven by affection and curiosity, rather than a desire to reclaim a title. As Van Assche put it, “More than a return to fashion, this feels like a return to why I wanted to make clothes in the first place.” That sentence gets straight to the heart of the project. The original label belonged to a younger designer trying to establish his voice while handling one of the biggest jobs in menswear. This version belongs to someone who has experienced the giant fashion house, stepped outside its demanding rhythm and rediscovered the simple pleasure of making things. He is not trying to conquer fashion again. He is making room for his own ideas, and that is precisely why this comeback feels so refreshing.