In 1986 six graduates of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, pooled their money, rented a camper van and drove to London to set up some booths at the British Designer Show, a precursor to London Fashion Week.
No one could pronounce their names, which also happened to be the names of their fashion labels – Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Marina Yee, so reporters (there to write about what was new) called them the Antwerp Six.
What the Antwerp Six shared wasn’t a look. The clothes they made ranged from the romantic Goth (Demeulemeester) to the pop conceptual (Van Beirendonck), the painterly subversive (Van Noten) and the camp athletic (Dirk Bikkembergs).
It was, rather, an age group, an alma mater and an attitude: DIY, anti-glamour, determinedly independent.
They were six different designers with six novel propositions about how people might want to dress, which had more to do with upheavals in culture and society than mores and the status quo.
And they changed fashion.
Because of the Antwerp Six, Belgium became known as the centre of fashion creativity. Because of them, would-be designers from all over the world went to Belgium to be trained.
Because of them, CEOs of fashion brands started looking for Belgian schools on the resumes of the creative directors they hired.
In fact, most of the power players of the fashion world have a lineage that can be traced directly back to the Antwerp Six.
Specifically, the current creative directors of Gucci, Chanel, Versace, Tom Ford, Marni, Saint Laurent, Maison Margiela, Prada, Diesel, Balmain and Rabanne all came through the Belgian school system or the Belgian mentorship system, or both.
They are all part of what Kaat Debo, the director of MoMu, the fashion museum in Antwerp, calls “the Belgian diaspora”, whether they were originally Belgian or not.
“It’s what Demna said,” Debo went on.
He paraphrased the creative director of Gucci, who is also a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts: “I was born in Georgia, but I was born as a fashion designer in Antwerp.”
Read more: Remembering Marina Yee, Antwerp Six designer who helped reshape Belgian fashion
How that happened and why it still resonates today is made clear by a new exhibition titled (of course) The Antwerp Six, which opened recently at MoMu.
It is the first show to reunite the Antwerp Six, who generally resented being lumped together.
They were initially reluctant to participate when approached two years ago by the exhibition’s curators: Debo; Romy Cockx, a curator at MoMu; and Geert Bruloot, a founder of Antwerp boutique Coccodrillo, which stocked designs by the Antwerp Six.
To be fair, there was a seventh member of the original Antwerp designer generation, perhaps the most influential of all – Martin Margiela.
He attended the Academy of Fine Arts and dated, and was inspired by, Marina Yee, but he went to Paris before any of the others and resisted being categorised with them – or anyone else, for that matter.
When asked to be interviewed for the MoMu exhibition catalogue, he declined because he felt the story was not his to tell.
Thus the show functions as both celebration and interrogation.
As Raf Simons, a member of the second Belgian generation, a former intern for Walter Van Beirendonck and now the co-creative director of Prada, said, the original lesson of the Antwerp Six was that the goal should be to “make our own system”.
Instead, the existing fashion system took note and then swallowed its progeny whole.
That is why, even though the Antwerp Six exhibited as a group for only three years before they went their separate ways, that time has become more than a moment in history.
It has become myth. Myth that represents the promise, and potential, of a once – and possibly future – fashion world.
The show features six separate galleries, each curated by the individual designers in collaboration with MoMu (including Yee, who had pivoted to art but died in December just before the show was finalised).
Thus, Van Beirendonck’s room features his face projected onto a mannequin standing amid a sea of other mannequins wearing his pop art creations and facing an alien robot character known as Puk Puk that often played a role in his collections.
Bikkembergs’ room is papered with images of his first store, which was entered through the imaginary apartment of a football player decades before fashion and football became a thing.
And Demeulemeester’s room is black with 20 mannequins wearing all black clothing from two decades of her career.
“It was a different view on fashion and how to make fashion and how to sell fashion,” Van Noten said of the group’s way of thinking.
And it worked in part because of the proliferation of multibrand boutiques that were discovering and supporting new talent, chief among them Barneys New York, which bought the collections of the Antwerp Six when they first exhibited in London.
“That meant that they had a selling point in New York, so they had press coverage in the US,” Bruloot said.
So they could start building their businesses, which they did slowly, over time.
Demeulemeester didn’t have her first show until she had been in business for 10 years.
They all shunned celebrities, precollections and any advertising at all. They used their shows as advertisements.
Van Noten’s gallery is covered in video screens displaying the finales of collections over the years because, he said, that was how he told his stories through clothing.
Yet as disparate as the Antwerp Six were, Simons said, they left one shared legacy for those who came after: a new “model for being an independent designer”.
Read more: 'Just too much': Designer Dries Van Noten on why he is retiring from fashion
When Simons, who had studied industrial design, finally decided to start his own label after working for Van Beirendonck, he was not scared.
“I saw how they did it,” he said.
“You make some stuff, you show some people. If it’s interesting, you can go to Paris and set up somewhere independently. There wasn’t a system or a structure. It was: Try to make great pants that aren’t around yet.”
And if you can’t afford to do it alone, you get together with some friends, pool your resources and see what happens.
The next generation of Belgian designers generally followed the Antwerp Six in starting their own labels.
Demna created Vetements, Simons his namesake line; ditto Haider Ackermann, now creative director of Tom Ford and a former student at the Royal Academy.
But as the designers were increasingly tapped to run megabrands, those small, independent lines became less and less tenable, and many are now closed.
It is thus possible to see the MoMu show as a relic of a bygone era, if you are taking it literally, or as inspiration if you see it conceptually.
“We don’t have the answers,” Debo said.
What the museum wanted to do, she said, was to “create a platform for dialogue”.
The idea, she said, was to ask: "What’s the future of independent fashion design? What’s the future of this industry? What do we actually show the consumer? What is fashion week? The Antwerp designers operated from the periphery. We all know that we need innovation in our industry. But who will bring the innovation?” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
