Kris Van Assche is a Belgian fashion designer whose menswear brings formal dress into contact with the clothes of youth culture. Tailoring gives the work its structure, while sportswear and unexpected proportion loosen its associations. His career spans a namesake label and creative leadership at Dior Homme and Berluti, followed by projects in objects and sculpture.

Van Assche graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1998, having studied womenswear. He moved to Paris to work with Hedi Slimane at Yves Saint Laurent and subsequently Dior Homme. Those years placed him inside a period when a narrow suit could suggest a different kind of masculinity, giving him a foundation from which to develop his own approach.

He established Kris Van Assche, his namesake label, in 2004 and became artistic director of Dior Homme in 2007. During eleven years at Dior, he expanded the relationship between the house’s tailoring and a younger wardrobe. The suit remained an object to question, with changes in scale and styling challenging its usual social meanings. At Berluti, where he led design from 2018 to 2021, that inquiry met a house rooted in leather and shoemaking.

His book 55 Collections gathered work across those three settings. “I always liked the tension between opposites,” he told i-D in September 2023, explaining how youth culture and couture could belong in the same collection. His own 2026 project statement describes a return to clothing through small quantities of deadstock fabric, bringing menswear and womenswear together. It allows a more intimate working scale, with each fabric imposing limits on how often a design can be repeated.