Dries Van Noten Got a Hand Cream Line. Its Founder Got a Foundation Grant.

In April 2026, Puig made two separate moves on the Dries Van Noten name in the same month. It extended the trademark into a nine-product hand and body care line, sold only through the brand's own stores and site. And it signed a three-year funding agreement with the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, the independent nonprofit the designer set up after leaving the fashion house he built. One transaction runs through the company Puig owns. The other runs through a foundation Puig does not own, funding the man who sold it his name.

A body care line built on the fragrance, not the runway

The new line, which reached Dries Van Noten's own channels and Nordstrom.com in April, comprises three body lotions, three bar soaps and three hand lotions, priced in the United States at $100, $90 and $54 respectively (list prices in Europe run 90, 75 and 45 euros). Each of the three scents is drawn directly from an existing Dries Van Noten perfume: Soie & Amber from Soie Malaquais, Pepper & Rose from Raving Rose, and Basil & Hinoki from Crazy Basil. The packaging is refillable glass with a gradient lacquer finish, aluminum tubes for the hand cream, and thin PET refill bottles, a format Puig has used elsewhere in its portfolio to argue for reduced packaging waste.

Ana Trias Arraut, Puig's president of Prestige & Fashion Brands, who oversees Dries Van Noten alongside Carolina Herrera, Rabanne, Nina Ricci and Jean Paul Gaultier, framed the launch as continuity rather than diversification, calling it "a natural step in shaping a more complete and cohesive beauty universe" and pointing to the refillable format as evidence of "a more responsible approach to consumption."

The line did not start from nothing. Dries Van Noten's first fragrance collection, ten genderless scents each developed with a different perfumer, launched in March 2022, four years after Puig took its majority stake in the house. Even after stepping back from ready-to-wear, the designer has stayed attached to that side of the business specifically. In an interview after his retirement, he said of the fragrance and beauty work: "I like it a lot. For me, this is the essence of what a fashion company is." He has continued to work on new scents with perfumer Alexandra Monet, describing his approach to combining them as ruleless: "I love to play with those things and experiment. To me, there are no rules."

The Byredo template

The pricing is not an accident of positioning. Byredo, the niche fragrance label Puig bought for a reported $1 billion in 2022, sells hand cream for $50 to $80 and body cream or lotion for $80 to $105, the closest price-band match to what Dries Van Noten just launched. Both brands entered Puig's portfolio as fragrance-first names and were later extended into home and body care at comparable prestige price points, rather than at the lower price of a mass hand cream or the higher price of a full skincare regimen. It is the same category-extension move run twice.

That extension sits inside a segment Puig calls Fragrance and Fashion, which does not break out Dries Van Noten's fragrance revenue on its own. In the fiscal year ended December 2025, the segment generated 3,646 million euros, 72 percent of Puig's total revenue, up 6.4 percent like-for-like. Puig's results press release credited "double-digit growth across the Niche portfolio led by Byredo," a category that includes Dries Van Noten, and separately noted that "DVN Fashion, in particular, delivered a stellar performance in FY 2025," a distinct line crediting the clothing business, not the fragrance line, the same year Julian Klausner took over as creative director. In the first half of 2026, the segment reached 1.72 billion euros, 73 percent of group revenue, up 3.8 percent like-for-like, with growth again attributed to "double-digit growth at Carolina Herrera and across Puig's niche fragrance portfolio, including Byredo and Dries Van Noten." Fashion was not singled out separately that time. Puig does not disclose enough to say which side of the house, clothing or scent, is carrying more of that growth. What the company chooses to name in its own results is the closest public signal available, and this year it has named fragrance twice and fashion once.

A separate check to the man who left

Dries Van Noten announced in March 2024 that he would step down after 38 years, showed his final menswear collection that June, and handed creative direction to Julian Klausner, who had worked on the brand's womenswear since 2018, in December 2024. Klausner's first runway show as creative director came in March 2025. Puig had bought its majority stake in the house back in 2018; Van Noten kept a minority shareholding and, until his departure, the chief creative officer title.

After leaving, Van Noten and his partner Patrick Vangheluwe founded the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, an independent nonprofit with no ownership tie to the fashion house, built to run exhibitions, residencies and educational programs across fashion, art, design and craft. Puig's three-year partnership with the Fondazione, announced in April 2026, coincided with the foundation's opening exhibition, "The Only True Protest Is Beauty," which opened April 25 in a Venice palazzo with more than 200 works from contributors including Christian Lacroix, Comme des Garçons and Misha Kahn. Puig has not disclosed the financial terms of the partnership. Chief executive José Manuel Albesa's stated rationale was relational rather than commercial: "Creativity lies at the heart of Puig's identity and long-term vision. We are pleased to continue our relationship with Dries Van Noten by supporting the Fondazione he has created."

The two April moves describe two different relationships. Puig owns the Dries Van Noten trademark outright and can extend it into new product categories without the founder's involvement; that is what the body care line is. The Fondazione is not something Puig owns, and funding it is closer to patronage of the person than investment in the brand, an unquantified outlay toward a man who no longer draws a creative director's salary from the company but whose name is still on every bottle. Neither move touches the part of the business getting the most outside attention this year, the eclectic prints and eccentric styling that made Klausner's runway shows the subject of fashion-press scrutiny and that has, by multiple retail accounts, become a recognizable reference point at high-street labels stocking similar color and print combinations. Puig's own disclosures this year point elsewhere: toward the fragrance line the founder still helps develop, the beauty category it is now extending at Byredo prices, and the foundation carrying his name after he left the runway to it.

Sources: Puig FY2025 results press release · Formes de Luxe · The Impression