poetic bohemia; Answering to no one, Dries Van Noten lets devotees find a look all their own.

Byline: Hamish Bowles

I'm in the mood for challenges," says Dries Van Noten, standing in the third-floor design studio of his 60,000-square-foot headquarters, built in the late nineteenth century as a warehouse serving the port of Antwerp. From one side there are views across the city's jagged gray roofs to St. Jacob's Church, where Rubens is buried, from the other a lively vista of cranes and boats in the sheltered harbor. "I think it's time to move on, to change things," the designer continues. "A challenge sometimes is not so good for our nerves, but that's the fun part of fashion and the advantage of being completely independent: that I don't have a financial person saying, 'This did very well last season. We have to continue with it.'_"

It is late November, and Van Noten and his twelve design assistants are working on the Egon Schiele-meets-Bling fall-winter men's collection (shown in Paris on January 27) and the characteristically poetic, _ethnic-eclectic women's collection (unveiled a month later). Like the designer, each assistant works on both men's and women's collections; Van Noten feels that there is always a symbiosis between the two. "I'm not such a split character that I can think completely differently," he says. "I don't think it's normal that you switch completely from one season to another . . . I think you are betraying a little bit your client."

Van Noten is fine-tuning the colorations of the nineteen different prints and the knitwear, embroideries, and accessories for his women's show. "Fools like us," he sighs, "developing new things every season! It's extremely expensive, and lots of fabrics are discarded. But what we did in the past, we did."

No matter how extravagant and time-consuming his passions may prove, Van Noten admits he can afford to indulge them. He has owned and managed his company since he opened his first store in 1985-172 square feet-in Nieuwe Gaanderij, a shabby shopping arcade in his native city. Longtime partner Patrick Vangheluwe, who joined the company as production manager in 1987, recalls that bemused Japanese buyers would imagine the door in back led to vast showrooms beyond. "To survive financially, I was designing six commercial collections by day and my own label by night," Van Noten remembers. Initially the lilliputian space was filled with whatever random merchandise he had persuaded the local manufacturers he was designing for to produce. "We had a shop full of sweaters one month," says Vangheluwe. "And one month it was only pajamas!"

Steel-haired and steely-eyed, Van Noten, like his clothes, is handsome in a resolutely unflamboyant way-with a lifestyle to match. Although he and Vangheluwe live in an exquisite 1840s white stucco mansion fit for a Russian archduchess in exile, and set in 50 acres of park and garden, they tend to the inventively landscaped grounds themselves and cook and serve dinners for their close-knit circle of friends in their stately dining room (flowers are exquisitely arranged by the green-thumbed Van Noten). Van Noten drives the half-hour commute himself and laughs when asked whether he has ever employed a chauffeur.

Today, Van Noten sells to more than 400 doors worldwide. In January he unveiled his third freestanding store, in an old bookshop on Paris's Left Bank, delightfully decorated with his friend Gert Voorjans to resemble a house filled with antiques. "I don't want the store to look like a fashion store," says Van Noten. "It's the same philosophy as the collection-I don't want to impose a silhouette on women. I propose a lot of options and possibilities, and women take what they want to wear."