TIM COPPENS

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In just three years—a startup period that would see most others still searching for steady ground—the young Belgian menswear designer Tim Coppens has managed to establish both a reputation for quality and a signature design vision that seem the end results of years of planning and perfecting. But to hear him tell it, it almost came about all too soon.

Back in 2011, Coppens, who was then part of the design team at Ralph Lauren’s performance line RLX, happened to cross paths with Stella Iishi, founder of The News showroom and an early champion of groundbreaking designers like Rei Kawakubo and Martin Margiela. “I worked on some pieces on the weekends and she saw them and she said, ‘Oh that’s cool, let’s show that to Barneys,'” he explains. A presentation to the department store’s men’s buyer Jay Bell followed and, within months, Coppens’ designs made their way onto the racks. “It’s a pretty big step, because when you work for labels, of course you eventually want to do your own thing. But then meeting Stella and being introduced to Jay and then having him place an order, immediately you have to make that click, Ok, now we’re a brand. So now we have to do this every six months,” Coppens explains. “It took a couple of weeks to realize that.”

Detractors—although there don’t seem to be many—might chalk it up to luck, but Coppens was ready to impress. Bell, writing on the Barneys blog in 2012, recalled Coppens’ early designs as “one technical feat of artistry after another” with a “fresh modern spirit unlike anything on the market.” In his collections since, the designer has crated a unique aesthetic, one that takes what might be seen as the classic American ideal of sportswear and adds the sort of intellectual twist one would expect from a graduate of Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. His time at RLX, along with an earlier stint designing for Adidas in Germany, might account for the technical innovations of his fabric choices, but Coppens says the idea of “activewear” has always guided his approach, appropriately enough for a former skateboarder and competitive runner. “I always need to go, you know? I’m active, and I want to translate that into the things that I do.”

For Spring 2014, that need for speed found expression in a collection inspired by Formula One racers in the Seventies, and specifically the wider milieu embodied by drivers like Jackie Stewart, Mario Andretti, Niki Lauda as captured by photographer Rainer W. Schlegelmilch. “When you see the pictures, it’s not just about a guy in a car,” Coppens says. “It’s really about getting in the car, pushing the pedal, then getting out and having a cigarette and drinking a glass of champagne, and there’s all these beautiful women sitting there in Monaco and the sun shines. It’s that whole thing that kind of attracts me.”

The color-blocked designs have a sleek, vigorous purity, quietly powerful in their brio, but Coppens credits his unconventional materials as well for a significant part of the collection’s emphatic dynamism. His leathers are tanned and then painted for a vintage look, and a dense bonded nylon and a papery nylon cotton play off against a cushiony sponge jersey. Coppens calls his interest in texture a holdover from his time at Adidas, and the connections he made with the mills scattered across Europe that now supply him. “They do a lot of innovations. They work with NASA as well as Dior for haute couture,” he says. “You don’t always see it because maybe they embroider metallic paillettes on, I don’t know, an aluminum-coated nylon, but if I use it on my garments it’s a little more technological. That is very important to me, especially in this line.”

In the few years since his fateful meetings with Ishii and Bell, Coppens has also earned a number of other valuable accolades, including the Ecco Domani award for Best New Menswear Designer in 2012, a nomination for the Swarovski Award for Menswear at last year’s CFDA’s and, perhaps most importantly to his line’s evolution, a nod as a finalist for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Coppens largely credits his latest supporter, in fact, for his recent surprise decision to expand into womenswear at his show during New York Fashion Week last September. “We worked on patterns for last season, but we weren’t ready for it,” he explains. “Now that we’re part of the Fashion Fund, Anna Wintour kind of hinted, ‘Are you going to do womenswear?’ Then they took the picture with the girl and the boy and they put it in Vogue. It’s an evolution—it’s just a start—and for me it’s important that the women’s is blended into the men’s collection.”

Coppens promises a full selection of womenswear is on the way, but first there’s the matter of Fall 2014, which he will show next Sunday. The designer suggests a “wintry theme with a lot of island influences,” but dedicated watchers know better than to expect anything as literal as floral prints or Bermuda shorts. Instead, as with last Fall’s skateboarders or this season’s racers, Coppens’ inspirations are rarely bluntly apparent. “The conceptual part is one thing, but when you see the collection, when you’re in the store, you want to see those garments, and you don’t care what I was thinking about,” he says. “You want to take that garment, you want to wear it, and that’s it.”

For more information, please visit TimCoppens.com. Styling by Zara Zachrisson. Grooming by Tracy Alfajora at Art Department. Models: Cameron Gentry and George Elliott at DNA Model Management and Evan Leff at Request Models.