The Smallest Fashion Country in Europe

Until 1986, Belgium was the least consequential fashion country in Western Europe. It had a textile industry — lace from Bruges, wool from the Wallonian mills — but no couture tradition, no named designers of international reputation, no presence on the Paris or Milan calendars. A Belgian woman who wanted a good dress went to Paris, or, if she was frugal, to an Antwerp copyist who had made the trip on her behalf.

The transformation came from a school. In 1963, under the direction of Mary Prijot, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp established a fashion department that was, from the outset, unlike any other European programme. Prijot's curriculum treated fashion as an extension of fine art rather than a commercial trade. Students were required to conceptualise a collection before they were permitted to sew it. The Academy's end-of-year shows, by the early 1980s, had become the most-watched European graduation shows outside Saint Martins.

The Antwerp Six

On the morning of 14 October 1986, six Academy graduates — Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Marina Yee — arrived in London in a single rented truck loaded with their collections. The British Fashion Council had given them a small off-schedule showing slot. The British press, unable to pronounce most of their names, dubbed them collectively the Antwerp Six.

What the six showed was not a collective vision but a shared method: collections conceived intellectually, cut unconventionally, produced in very small runs, and shown with minimal theatricality. Van Noten's embroidered suits looked more like textile exhibitions than ready-to-wear. Demeulemeester's monochromatic tailoring was severe where Italian tailoring was exuberant. Van Beirendonck's work was openly unsellable — dressed manikins, concept pieces, statements rather than clothes. British buyers did not know what to do with any of it. French buyers, who came up from Paris in the second week, bought everything.

Margiela and the Maison

The Antwerp Six were joined, from 1988 onward, by a seventh Belgian who had not gone to London with them. Martin Margiela, a 1979 Academy graduate who had worked for Jean Paul Gaultier, opened Maison Martin Margiela in Paris with the business partner Jenny Meirens. The first collection was shown in an empty children's playground in Place Saint-Sulpice, the models walking on wooden planks between the swings. The clothes were tagged with blank labels — the now-famous four-white-stitches label that identified the house without naming it.

Margiela was, across the following twenty years, the single most influential European fashion designer of his generation. The exposed seam, the garment constructed from an older garment, the Tabi split-toe boot, the oversized proportion — all entered the European vocabulary through his collections. He gave no interviews. He was never photographed. The house was sold to Diesel in 2002; he withdrew in 2008 and has not been seen publicly since.

Raf Simons and the Second Generation

Belgium's second act came in the 1990s with Raf Simons, trained not at the Antwerp Academy but under Walter Van Beirendonck's direction. Simons's menswear collections from 1995 — referencing Joy Division, Peter Saville graphic design, German post-punk, and British rave — defined what conceptual menswear would look like for the next twenty years. He was appointed to Jil Sander in 2005, to Dior couture in 2012, to Calvin Klein in 2016, and served as co-creative-director of Prada alongside Miuccia from 2020 to 2025. No Belgian designer has run more international houses.

The smaller Belgian establishment — Bruno Pieters, Haider Ackermann, Christian Wijnants, A.F. Vandevorst, Véronique Branquinho — continues the Academy tradition. Antwerp remains the European fashion capital with the smallest industrial base and the largest intellectual footprint. The country produces, per capita, more internationally significant fashion designers than any other.