Walter Van Beirendonck was born in 1957 in Brecht, Belgium, and enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1975. He graduated in 1980 — a year before the other Antwerp Six members, though he is conventionally grouped with them. He launched his W.<B.D.T. label in 1983 and added, through the 1990s, the Wild and Lethal Trash line (known as W.<L.T.), which ran from 1993 to 1999 as a collaboration with the Mustang Jeans group.

The Vocabulary

Where the other Antwerp Six graduates worked in neutrals and deconstruction, Van Beirendonck built his vocabulary from saturated cartoon colour, graphic prints, masks, inflatable accessories, and a catalogue of queer, utopian, and sometimes unsettling imagery drawn from comics, science fiction, and pornography. His catwalks have included performers dressed as teddy bears, latex sex masks, prosthetic muscles, and full-body digital prints. The work sits at the edge of fashion and performance art.

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Clothes should make you feel something. If they don't, they are only laundry. — Walter Van Beirendonck

The Academy

Van Beirendonck has, since 1985, taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where he has been head of fashion since 2006. He is responsible — as teacher or mentor — for the formal training of Raf Simons, Bruno Pieters, Kris Van Assche, Tim Van Steenbergen, Haider Ackermann, and Glenn Martens. His pedagogical contribution to European fashion, considered as a generational fact, has been roughly as significant as his design output.

He continues to present collections in Paris and to teach in Antwerp. He is sixty-seven at the time of writing.