\u00c0 Londres<\/p>\n
At a certain point, the Golden Spindles were done. We wanted to continue, we wanted really to be real, not making clothes for a contest, but to make clothes to put on the market, to show to the world. We were all very naive, but very ambitious. So everybody tried to make a collection and Geert Bruloot [who co-owned a shoe shop in Antwerp at the time, acted as \u201ctroupe leader\u201d to the Six, and is a co-curator of the MoMu] said, \u2018Let\u2019s rent a caravan together and then we can go to London.\u2019 The others had already decided to go, but I was pregnant and I didn\u2019t have a collection yet, the only thing I had ready was sunglasses. So they went to London and they took my sunglasses. [It was] in \u201986 that they went to London, but I wasn\u2019t there, I was giving birth to my son.<\/p>\n
The third time I had my collection ready. At first I was hesitating because my goal was to make a collection and to go to Paris, but then I thought, \u2018Okay, maybe it\u2019s nice to go to London,\u2019 because London seemed a bit nicer to me in the sense that if you make a mistake, it\u2019s maybe not such a big deal in London.<\/p>\n
I spent every penny I had to make a little collection and we went to London and we had this little stand at the British designer show. My husband made photos\u2014big photos\u2014and he put them on a little stand and we put a table, two chairs and one rack of clothes. It would be all or nothing because we spent everything we had. It was very special because after five minutes, somebody came in, sat down and started to write orders, and it went on like that for four days.<\/p>\n
It was amazing. My first client was Barneys. They sat down and they said, \u2018Let\u2019s make an order.\u2019 And I said, \u2018Yes, okay.\u2019 And each time I had to convince them to pay upfront or to give me a letter of credit to be able to produce because I was completely self-supporting everything. But they all agreed and thanks to that I could start. I produced my first season and I scotched-taped the boxes, I telexed the invoices because faxes didn\u2019t exist yet\u2014can you imagine?<\/p>\n
Each to Their Own<\/p>\n
People couldn\u2019t pronounce our names, it was impossible, forget it, they didn\u2019t even start. They just saw that there were six new designers, that all six were very different, and everybody liked somebody of the six, and they just called us the Six because it was so much easier, and it was special because it was six designers coming out of a country where nobody expected anything from. I remember my first clients asked me, \u2018Belgium, where is that?\u2019 Even the first time I was in London, I had to explain where Belgium was.<\/p>\n
And then it became like a little bit of a myth because everybody had heard of the Six, so every single interview I have done all my life, the first question was about the Antwerp Six. I went crazy; but okay, I\u2019m used to it now, voil\u00e0. It has become the story that speaks to the imagination\u2014that there is a group of six kids who just start all by themselves doing everything themselves and everybody in his own way. And some of us had a backer, others had nothing. I mean, we worked to be there. It\u2019s unimaginable in the world we live in now if you see how things function now. Everything is different, but okay, I mean, every time has its particularities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00c0 Londres At a certain point, the Golden Spindles were done. We wanted to continue, we wanted really…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3040,19],"class_list":{"0":"post-8502","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-antwerp","8":"tag-ann-demeulemeester","9":"tag-antwerp"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/116294980928570092","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}