ALONG WITH COLOR, Van Noten also has an unrivaled sense of pattern. The designs that ornament his clothes allude to everything from Qing Dynasty decorations and the paintings of Francis Bacon to Ottoman-era iconography and the artist James Reeve’s photographs of cities at night. All designers take from cultures and periods and artists foreign to their own experience, of course, but too often, their tributes feel costume-y, suggesting an invented passion rather than a real one. Van Noten’s borrowings are less literal than they are gestural — yes, the pieces in his fall 2012 collection were covered with stylized Chinese dragons and phoenixes (rendered in a vivid, imperial saffron), but they were pieced alongside shimmering stripes of vermilion and jade of the sort that adorn the canopies of tantric Buddhist temples in Nepal, and Japanese cranes stitched in gold and frozen in midflight. The difference between a designer and a copyist is that a designer makes his source material into something else, something his own; he doesn’t just present it, unchanged and unsynthesized, as work he’s created himself.

Curiously, it is in his wide-ranging eye, in his knowledge of textile and artistic traditions from the world’s great civilizations, that Van Noten announces himself as Flemish. Designers these days rarely work where they were born or became adults — to be in fashion now is to exchange actual citizenship for the parallel universe in which the industry operates, a universe consisting of Milan, Paris, London, New York and maybe Tokyo — and yet Van Noten, who is as well-traveled as any of his peers, continues to reside and work in Antwerp, where he was born, raised and educated. (His current estate, Ringenhof, an 1840s neo-Classical stone house built for a local beer brewer, is a peaceful 30-minute drive from the city center.) When Van Noten was a child, Antwerp was mostly a quiet, bourgeois town, and yet fashion, the idea of it, wasn’t an impossible concept for him. His father, himself descended from a family of tailors, owned several boutiques and made regular trips to Milan and Paris to buy polite, well-constructed Italian and French wares: shoes from Ferragamo, shirts from Charvet. As a teenager, Van Noten acted as the buyer for the children’s department. The stores would occasionally host Saturday-afternoon shows, local models spinning through the space while wearing the season’s new offerings. In making their lives in textiles, in fabrics, in goods from all the countries and cultures surrounding tiny Belgium, the family was following in the Lowlands’ centuries-long legacy of trade, joining the generations of burghers who let their fingertips trace over foreign silks and foreign wools, who measured foreign dyes and foreign powders. If you were a wealthy 13th-century merchant in Bruges, 60 miles west of Antwerp, you would, in a real way, spend your lifetime encountering patterns and colors from lands you could only imagine through their material goods; wonderment would be in your blood. To be Flemish — as Van Noten adamantly is — was to spend your life looking outward and beyond.

This perspective may explain in part why the arrival of the so-called Antwerp Six — a group of early ’80s graduates of the fashion school at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts that included Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester and Walter Van Beirendonck, who together mounted a now-legendary, semi-guerrilla-style show in London in 1986 — was more a surprise to the rest of the world than to the participants themselves. (Martin Margiela is a contemporary of the Antwerp Six, though he wasn’t part of that initial presentation.) Van Noten crossed into adulthood in the 1970s, in the early years of modern cultural globalization, when ideas and aesthetics and music and art traveled faster and farther than ever before in human history. You could be an adolescent in Antwerp and hear punk music from London or West Berlin, and suddenly you would understand that someone out there was creating something that you could be a part of, that you could participate in, that seemed to communicate directly to you. You were seeing images in magazines and on television of people your age or a little older or a little younger doing things that you too might be able to do, and it was transfixing, transformative. For Van Noten, that person was David Bowie, and years later, he paid homage to him — his narrow, bladelike suits, his languor and loucheness — again and again. And it wasn’t just in fashion: All over, in countries both free and not, young people were realizing that what might unite them wasn’t family or heritage or nation, it was music or art or theater or film. They were creating the new wave, the avant-garde, but they had begun doing so as a way of seeking some sort of greater connection — as a way to reach somebody else.