Ask most men to name the fashion capitals and you will get the usual four: Paris, Milan, London, New York. Ask anyone who actually works in fashion and a fifth city comes up almost immediately, and it is not Tokyo. It is Antwerp, a Flemish port city of half a million people that has produced more consequential designers per capita than anywhere on earth. How that happened is one of the great stories in modern style, and it starts with a rented truck.
The academy
The story begins at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, an institution founded in the 1660s whose fashion department became, by the late 1970s, one of the most demanding design educations anywhere. The programme was, and remains, famously brutal: four years, ruthless annual culls, and a philosophy that treated fashion not as a trade but as an artistic discipline with a point of view. You were not taught to make pretty clothes. You were taught to have something to say and to say it in cloth. Most fashion schools produce employees. Antwerp set out to produce authors.
1986: six designers and a truck
In the early 1980s a remarkable cluster of graduates came out of that programme, and in 1986 six of them, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee, pooled their money, rented a truck, loaded it with their collections, and drove to London to show at the British Designer Show. Nobody could pronounce their names, so the British press gave up and called them the Antwerp Six, and the label stuck. What they showed was unlike anything on the racks: intellectual, sharply constructed, romantic and severe at once, clothes from a place with no fashion establishment and therefore no rules inherited from one. Buyers noticed. Then the world did.
The audacity of it still delights me. They did not wait for Paris to invite them. They drove.
The seventh
Hovering just outside the group photo is the man some call the seventh member: Martin Margiela, an Academy graduate of the same generation who went to Paris, worked under Jean Paul Gaultier, and founded his own house in 1988. Margiela became fashion's great invisible man, never photographed, never interviewed in person, letting deconstructed seams, exposed linings, and repurposed garments speak instead. He took the Antwerp instinct, that clothing is an argument, further than anyone, and his influence on how designers think today is almost impossible to overstate.
What Antwerp stands for
What unites these designers is not a look but a posture. Antwerp fashion is conceptual without being unwearable, dark without being gloomy, and utterly indifferent to trend cycles. Dries Van Noten builds collections around color and print the way a composer builds around a theme, and still runs his house from Antwerp, with his flagship, Het Modepaleis, in a grand nineteenth-century building on the Nationalestraat. Ann Demeulemeester made black and white and poetic severity into a signature so complete that her name became an adjective. These are clothes for people who dress deliberately, which is to say, clothes aligned with everything this journal believes.
The city today
Antwerp never let the moment pass. The fashion department's graduate show remains one of the most scouted events in the industry, and the city built its identity around the craft: the ModeMuseum, known as MoMu, anchors the fashion district on the Nationalestraat, and the surrounding streets hold a density of serious, independent design that puts far larger cities to shame. The spirit extends beyond clothing. Theo, the gleefully inventive eyewear house I have written about in the frames section of this site, is Antwerp born and bred, and you can feel the same DNA in it: idiosyncratic, exacting, and completely unbothered by what everyone else is doing.
There is a lesson in Antwerp for any man who dresses, and it is the same lesson the Six taught in 1986. Authority in style is not granted by the established capitals, the big names, or the room you happen to be standing in. It is taken, by people with a clear point of view and the nerve to drive it to London themselves. A small city with conviction beat the empires. A man with conviction can certainly beat the office dress code.
Explore further: Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, and MoMu Antwerp.
Dress for yourself, not the room. Antwerp dressed for itself, and the room came to Antwerp.
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