Adrian Ward-Rees will become president of Dries Van Noten on December 1, taking over from Axel Keller after five years in the role. The announcement came in a short statement on Friday morning, the kind of brevity houses use when the succession has already been settled internally.
Parent company Puig does not break out sales by brand, but Dries Van Noten recorded double-digit growth in the first half of 2026, ahead of the group’s 4.4 percent like-for-like increase. The brand is therefore being handed over while it is working, not while it is being repaired.
Ward-Rees arrives from Moncler Grenoble, where he has been chief business officer since October 2024. His career reads less like a designer’s than a merchant’s, with stops at Amiri, Burberry, Dior Homme, Speedo and Nike alongside retail tenures at Selfridges and Lane Crawford.
The open question is whether the next phase is a wider distribution or a deeper one. A retail operator by training tends to favour the second, and the Gallery format already suggests where the house believes its future footprint lies.
Keller leaves behind a substantially different company. He oversaw flagships in New York and London, a series of smaller Gallery stores in Paris, Brussels, Milan and Kyoto, and an accessories business that barely existed when he started.
That last detail is the interesting one. A house built on the Antwerp discipline of fabric and print is handing its commercial apparatus to someone who has spent years on the selling floor, watching how garments behave once the show is over.
He also managed the creative transition after Dries Van Noten himself stepped down, accompanying the appointment of Julian Klausner as creative director in 2024. Continuity through a founder’s exit is the hardest assignment in this business, and the house credited him with it explicitly.
