Dries Van Noten Spring 2009

It feels like the fashion crowd has waited all season for the other shoe to drop: the moment when some designer would muster the clarity to arrange a viewing of clothes any woman could look at and think, Yep, I can see myself in that. In Paris, it was Dries Van Noten who assumed the mantle of spokesperson for every woman's everyday wear. "Accessible" and "pragmatic" can sound like synonyms for "boring" in the lexicon of fashion-speak, but Van Noten's simplified solutions for urban elegance quickly put a stop to that kind of talk.