Dries Van Noten chooses Venice to live and create his Foundation. Following the meeting in October during Venice Fashion Week, today comes the official announcement: from April 2026, Palazzo Pisani Moretta will be an open laboratory, an international creative hub to promote craftsmanship and the various arts
Venice has a new hub dedicated to those who create, experiment, and work with their hands and minds. Dries Van Noten has chosen Venice as his home and Palazzo Pisani Moretta, in the San Polo district, to give shape to the Foundation created with Patrick Vangheluwe, which will open in April 2026: a place where fashion, craftsmanship, glass, but also cuisine, music, and song will meet without hierarchies.
We are still moved by the shared reflection last October at the Serra dei Giardini Reali when Dries Van Noten met the Venetian public for the first time for the talk during Venice Fashion Week, together with Sara Sozzani Maino, Creative Director of Fondazione Sozzani, journalist, writer, and fashion critic Antonio Mancinelli, and Venice Gardens Foundation president Adele Re Rebaudengo.
Surrounded by students and young entrepreneurs, Van Noten explained why Venice is the ideal place for his Foundation: it is a city that offers unique cultural stimuli, a vibrant place with many young people ready to take on challenges, where education and creativity are part of the urban fabric, where people walk and meet.
“Usually one stays on the surface – he told Vogue – you see the postcards, the gondolas. But living here, we discovered another Venice: the markets, the fishmongers, the young people, the energy that flows beneath the beauty. That’s how we fell in love with it.”
Projects and Collaborations
Today the Dries Van Noten Foundation is finally a reality: a non-profit project to connect different disciplines, support emerging talents, work with students and schools, and speak to all generations, bringing attention back to the heart of all arts: craftsmanship.
Proud to have increased the number of residents in Venice by five, in an intimate candlelit evening Dries and Patrick presented the ongoing projects and collaborations.
Opening in April 2026 with presentations and collateral events: interdisciplinary projects, artistic residencies, workshops, performances, talks with young artisans, screenings, food-related meetings, convivial moments, partnerships with Venetian and international organizations, and initiatives that relate to the main events in Venice’s cultural calendar.
A Project for the City
There are two interventions on Venice’s urban heritage: the restoration of Palazzo Pisani Moretta scheduled to begin in autumn 2026 under the direction of Venetian architect Alberto Torsello to adapt the spaces to their new cultural function and preserve the 18th-century decorations commissioned by Chiara Pisani – salons, stuccoes, and baroque frescoes by artists such as Giambattista Tiepolo, Jacopo Guarana, Gaspare Diziani, and Giuseppe Angeli.
The opening of Studio San Polo is planned, a space – whose project is entrusted to Giulia Foscari of Studio UNA / UNLESS – conceived as a contemporary laboratory and working environment: an essential and versatile place dedicated to workshops, residencies, performances, and moments of informal exchange among creatives, students, and professionals.
The Foundation Opens Its Doors to Young People
“The Foundation will be open not only to young people or the “best” students, but also to those who hesitate or are searching for their own path” Van Noten said in October. According to Antonio Mancinelli, the involvement of diverse creative practices could generate a true “collective pollination,” in which arts and crafts cross-fertilize. When asked how a designer can grow and emerge, Van Noten – who with his own brand and the Antwerp Six group made Antwerp one of fashion’s most important capitals, advised starting from one’s own city, with one’s own community, like a tailor working for a loyal clientele.
Schools, academies, and universities will be part of a program aimed at those seeking their own language through making. “Sometimes – Van Noten emphasized – what’s needed is trust, rather than selection.” The goal is to demonstrate that manual crafts and creativity can be meaningful professional paths, valuing the process more than the final result. Because, as Van Noten has repeatedly stated – imperfection is beauty, and working with one’s hands, today, is a contemporary act.
Techniques, Talents, Ideas Without Borders in Venice
In the manifesto of the Dries Van Noten Foundation, in Venice “craftsmanship transforms the ephemeral into the eternal.” The Foundation joins the city’s long creative history, today also expressed through international cultural events such as Homo Faber and the Venice Biennale, as a space for continuous dialogue between local talent and international creativity.
Dries Van Noten Foundation
info@fondazionedriesvannoten.org
@fondazionedriesvannoten
San Polo, 2766
30125 Venice
Article by Lucia Pecoraro and Laura Scarpa.
Cover: Dries Van Noten at the Giardini Reali di San Marco for the Talk: The Future of Fashion is Responsible by Venice Fashion Week 2025 ph. Marta Formentello. Photos by Igor Serdyukov for Venice Fashion Week.
The photos of Palazzo Pisani Moretta are by Camilla Glorioso – Courtesy of Dries Van Noten.
