By Bent Van Looy
Growing up in Antwerp tends to warp one’s views on fashion.
This has little to do with the droves of puffer-jacketed shoppers you see on the weekend, dragging themselves from the Groenplaats, central Antwerp, towards the majestic Centraal Station, where they will take their trains back to suburbia, carrying plastic bags stuffed with purchases from Primark and Zara.
One could blame Antwerp’s glorious Golden Century (the sixteenth, if you must know), when the city amassed enormous wealth, trading, among other things, the finest fabrics and woven cloths in the world.
But no, the reason we Antwerpians grow up with the idea that high fashion is as commonplace as bus stops or pigeon droppings is the Royal Academy of Fine Arts – a crumbling hodgepodge of historic buildings in the heart of town, where many an aspiring artist has walked under the arch marking the boundary between the overgrown sculpture garden inside the Academy and the world at large.
In 1886, a young hopeful was spotted on his way out, having been turned away by the traditionalist academic powers that be. His name was Vincent Van Gogh.
A century later, six graduates of the recently established fashion department passed through the very same arch, albeit less defeated. Having finished four years of training, this small group of young men and women were ready to spread their wings and conquer the world.
It’s 1986, and the talented bunch have decided to exhibit their work at the British Designer Show in London. Because their names – Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Marina Yee, Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck and Dirk Bikkembergs (above, left to right) – proved to be tongue-twisters, their work appears under the moniker ‘The Antwerp Six’. They, and more precisely their groundbreaking ideas and designs, became a sensation.
Ever since, fashion students from all over the world have flocked to The Six’s alma mater, hoping to soak up some of its magic fashion juice. They can be spotted, on their way to school, like shimmering goldfish in an ocean of cod. I often stopped to stare at them when I was growing up on the streets of Antwerp in the mid-nineties.
Dressed in avant-garde designer clothes or insane combinations of vintage and outlandish, often asymmetrical creations of their own, these fashion students blew my mind in the way they dared to stand out in a crowd. They, like the Antwerp Six and some of the amazing designers who followed in their footsteps, threw open a window towards the possible for me.
But, when we think of what we see on the runway of, let’s say, a Dries Van Noten men’s show, we tend to forget that a lot of what’s on display (the splendour, the drama, the explosions of colour) is firmly rooted in the codes and methods of traditional tailoring.
Van Noten (who I interviewed in 2017, above) grew up in a menswear family. His grandfather started out as a tourneur (someone who takes apart second-hand garments, then restores and re-sells them), before producing his own fabrics and opening up a men’s clothing shop in Antwerp, a business that was eventually taken over and expanded by Dries’ father, Hubert. Van Noten Couture, as their Kammenstraat store was called, sold fairly classic fare like Zegna or Ferragamo.
As a young boy, Dries (Dries, Raf, Ralph — we all seem to be on a first-name basis with these guys) often accompanied his parents on buying trips to Italy, where he absorbed the intricacies of the trade in the showrooms of Milan and Florence.
Unsatisfied with the prospects of a traditional career and a straight-laced continuation of tradition, Dries flourished at the Academy. Inspired by art, craft and the eccentric audacity of his fellow students, he emerged as someone who didn’t see these traditions and techniques as the end goal, but as a means to an end.
To what end? To explore the things that moved and inspired him. Yes, Van Noten and the rest of the Six learned the ropes within the walls of the Academy, but they also discovered that these traits were there to be used, sometimes abused, to be stretched out and slapped back together.
Their imagination took us on a journey through art history, just look at Dries Van Noten’s S/S 2001 collection, a colourful and very stripey evocation of David Hockney (above); and literature, see Ann Demeulemeester’s S/S 07 show, a moody homage to the poetry of Rimbaud; or even more abstract notions like Walter Van Beirendonck’s darkly optimistic jousting with cartoon imagery, tribal elements and the codes of BDSM.
Sounds crazy? Perhaps. Mr Van Noten would likely be the first to downplay my lofty theorising; of the six, he is perhaps the one who is rooted most firmly in the commercial reality that spawned him. As he said in an interview with The Talks: “We don’t make couture; we make prêt-à-porter. And I’m very strict with that.”
A passion for solid, wearable pieces, cut for the ages, shines through in everything Dries does.
I remember seeing him standing in front of MoMu in Antwerp, waiting for his 2015 Inspirations exhibition to open, and being struck by the elegant simplicity of his personal style: a navy merino sweater and wide but slightly tapered chinos on top of white tennis shoes. Over the years he has refined his look – rooted in British country chic and Ivy (like the oversized chequered blazer he wore in the Antwerp Six promo pictures in 1986) – to reflect sobriety and timeless elegance.
That veneration of tradition also featured heavily in Van Noten’s 17 F/W men’s show, where the logos and labels of Fox Brothers, Lovat and Marling & Evans were enlarged and emblazoned on sweaters and the linings of jackets, paying homage to the companies that had supplied him with materials over the decades.
Whatever the theme of the dream may be, the vocabulary of classic tailoring serves as a beacon in any collection of the Antwerp Six, bobbing to the surface now and again to guide us through the rough seas of the designers’ wildest imagination.
Take the suit above from one of Van Noten’s last collections (S/S 24) before he retired in June 2024. Long considered a master of colour, his combination of biscuity brown with a deep wine red is chic and accessible. And the cloth will appeal to most PS readers: a slubby, silken herringbone that bears a striking resemblance to the cloth of one of Simon’s more popular jackets.
Even someone as futuristic and out there as Walter Van Beirendonck understands the architecture of a classic suit. I was once gifted one of his blazers to wear while I performed on stage; tartan cloth with a structured shoulder – I could’ve sworn it had been cut by a Savile Row tailor, if it weren’t for the portholes in the front, back and sleeves.
Outlandish? Sure. I chose to see them as peepholes into the playful soul of their creator. Or indeed: windows towards the possible.
Bent Van Looy is an Antwerp-based writer, artist and musician.
The Antwerp Six 40th anniversary retrospective opens in Antwerp’s MoMu on March 28th.
