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.<\/p>\n
No one could pronounce their names, which also happened to be the names of their fashion labels \u2013\u00a0Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Marina Yee,\u00a0so reporters (there to write about what was new) called them the Antwerp Six.<\/p>\n
What the Antwerp Six shared wasn\u2019t 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).<\/p>\n
It was, rather, an age group, an alma mater and an attitude: DIY, anti-glamour, determinedly independent.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And they changed fashion.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Because of them, CEOs of fashion brands started looking for Belgian schools on the resumes of the creative directors they hired.<\/p>\n
In fact, most of the power players of the fashion world have a lineage that can be traced directly back to the Antwerp Six.<\/p>\n
Specifically,\u00a0the 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.<\/p>\n
They are all part of what Kaat Debo, the director of MoMu, the fashion museum in Antwerp, calls \u201cthe Belgian diaspora\u201d, whether they were originally Belgian or not.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s what Demna said,\u201d Debo went on.<\/p>\n
He\u00a0paraphrased the creative director of Gucci, who is also a graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts: \u201cI was born in Georgia, but I was born as a fashion designer in Antwerp.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read more:\u00a0Remembering Marina Yee, Antwerp Six designer who helped reshape Belgian fashion<\/a><\/p>\n How that happened and why it still resonates today is made clear by a new exhibition titled (of course) The Antwerp Six,\u00a0which opened recently\u00a0at MoMu.<\/p>\n It is the first show to reunite the Antwerp Six, who generally resented being lumped together.<\/p>\n They\u00a0were initially reluctant to participate when approached two years ago by the exhibition\u2019s curators: Debo; Romy Cockx, a curator at MoMu; and Geert Bruloot, a founder of Antwerp boutique Coccodrillo, which stocked designs by the Antwerp Six.<\/p>\n To be fair, there was a seventh member of the original Antwerp designer generation, perhaps the most influential of all\u00a0\u2013\u00a0Martin Margiela.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013\u00a0or anyone else, for that matter.<\/p>\n When asked to be interviewed for the MoMu exhibition catalogue, he declined because he felt the story was not his to tell.<\/p>\n Thus the show functions as both celebration and interrogation.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmake our own system\u201d.<\/p>\n Instead, the existing fashion system took note and then swallowed its progeny whole.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n It has become myth. Myth that represents the promise, and potential, of a once \u2013\u00a0and possibly future \u2013\u00a0fashion world.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n Thus, Van Beirendonck\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Bikkembergs\u2019 room is papered with images of his first store, which was entered through the imaginary apartment of a football\u00a0player decades before fashion and football became a thing.<\/p>\n And Demeulemeester\u2019s room is black with 20 mannequins wearing all black clothing from two decades of her career.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a different view on fashion and how to make fashion and how to sell fashion,\u201d Van Noten said of the group\u2019s way of thinking.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThat meant that they had a selling point in New York,\u00a0so they had press coverage in the US,\u201d\u00a0Bruloot said.<\/p>\n So they could start building their businesses, which they did slowly, over time.<\/p>\n Demeulemeester didn\u2019t have her first show until she had been in business for 10 years.<\/p>\n They all shunned celebrities, precollections and any advertising at all. They used their shows as advertisements.<\/p>\n Van Noten\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Yet as disparate as the Antwerp Six were, Simons said, they left one shared legacy for those who came after: a new \u201cmodel for being an independent designer\u201d.<\/p>\n