The Antwerp Six Are Getting a Retrospective at the MoMu Museum

That someone anointed a clutch of emerging Belgian designers The Antwerp Six was something of a fluke — no doubt the abbreviation had something to do with their tongue-twisting names — but their talent, uncompromising visions, ambition and chutzpah were no accident.

Forty years after Marina Yee, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs and Dirk Van Saene burst onto the international scene, their hometown fashion museum MoMu is giving them the full exhibition treatment. It opens to the public Saturday and runs through Jan. 17, 2027.

At turns educational, amusing and stirring, it documents a transformative era in fashion, demonstrates the power of original storytelling, exalts six unique personalities and careers — and serves as a potent rallying cry for unfettered, unrushed creativity.

“I hope this is the inspiration we can give to the young generation, to try to remain independent,” said Geert Bruloot, guest curator of the exhibition and the ringleader of the Six’s impromptu appearance at a London trade show in 1986 that sparked the myth, and made a small Belgian city an overnight fashion sensation. “[The Six] did it their own way. They broke the rules their own way… so they were free to create whatever, whenever they wanted, until the last day they had their company.”

Burloot was joined by his co-curators Kaat Debo and Romy Cockx, who led WWD through the lively displays, which incorporate videos, music, installations and the occasional mechanical gizmo to dramatic effect — alongside dozens of garments culled from the museum’s collection, which spans 45,000 objects, and the archives of the designers.

All of the Six except Yee, who died last November at age 67, are expected to attend the VIP opening Friday along with such notables as Raf Simons, Pieter Mulier, Stephen Jones and Linda Loppa.

Burloot, whose many claims to fame in Belgian fashion include operating the landmark Antwerp shoe store Coccodrillo for 36 years, said international retailers were instrumental in fanning the fame of the Antwerp Six, all alumni of the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

“They had just lived the adventure of the Japanese designers, which was a big success,” he said, referring to the likes of Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, who exploded onto the scene in the early ’80s by showing in Paris. “But [the stores] needed a new story because they found out stories were working in fashion. It was new.”

To be sure, the Antwerp Six offered diverse and radical aesthetic propositions — from Bikkembergs’ obsession with soccer and athleticism to Demeuleemester’s dark romanticism. Still, all boasted formidable design chops, deep cultural and historical knowledge, a respect for how garments are made, and a patient approach to brand building.

They also operated somewhat on the margins of the industry, persevering with a strategy distinct from today’s mega brands: No advertising, no celebrity dressing, no handbag push and no pre-collections.

Demeulemeester, who was putting the finishing touches on her room in the exhibition last Thursday, stopped to explain her slow, deliberate approach.

“I didn’t want to wait until one beautiful manufacturer would fall out of the sky. I thought, I’m going to start myself, and I’ll see where I go,” she related. “And so I established the label in 1985 with [my husband] Patrick, and we started, little by little, step by step. I worked 10 years before I could do my first show because I started with a very, very little amount of money, and I constructed everything.”

In a 2006 interview with WWD, Loppa, then head of the MoMu fashion museum and the Royal Academy of Fine Art’s fashion school, noted that glamour was never a big concern for Belgian designers.

“In the shops, Belgian designers have a good sell-through. It’s not always in the window, but it’s what people buy. You always find good trousers, good sweaters, good jackets,” she said at the time. “We’re too focused on a good garment, that the fit is good, the sizes are good, the delivery is good, that it’s selling. It’s a very honest way of working.”

Debo, director and chief curator of MoMu, said the new exhibition was organized primarily “to celebrate their work, their impact, their legacy.”

“We could have waited until the 50th anniversary, but for us as a museum, it was important to do an authorized show, because we needed their archives. We needed their stories, so we wanted their collaboration, and we needed their approval to do the show,” she told WWD. “Also, the themes linked to this group are very relevant today. It’s about talent development. It’s about the future of independent fashion design.”

Debo remarked on the irony that the Antwerp Six, despite their fierce independence and radically different fashion statements, benefited from “a kind of uber branding, though nobody ever invested $1 in it.”

They also shared a burning ambition to make it big on the global fashion stage via compelling, original designs and storytelling.

“Very early on, they understood that fashion is more than making clothes. It’s an entire creative world,” Debo said. “It has to do with how you communicate, how you present your clothes in your stores, on the catwalk — that fashion is a cultural realm.”

Cockx noted that healthy competition between the Six spurred them on to improve their products, presentations and imagery, with Bikkembergs being the first to stage a solo catwalk show.

The exhibition allowed the curators to nail down many facts and figures, which might have been lost had they waited. “As an historian, I realized again how important it is to have documentation — the press articles, the invitations,” Cockx said.

To wit: The display opens with curved walls plastered with news clippings, photography, text and video, recounting how the Six emerged amid a unique economic, social, cultural and fashion context.

Visitors learn that the Six not only studied together, but also partied together and crashed Paris Fashion Week, once forging Jean Paul Gaultier show invitations out of yogurt lids.

Then each of the Six gets a dedicated room showcasing their work. Bikkembergs opted to broadcast giant photos of his designs on his favorite models, whose bulging quads and biceps underscore his pioneering blend of fashion, sport and sexual provocation. “He saw football players as the new rock stars,” Cockx commented.

Van Beirendonck selected 35 looks from across his long career, and projects his face onto a black-clad figure that’s engaged in conversation with a robot-like stack of monitors.

“What about the future? What do you see?” the robot asks.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it. So I keep pushing. Future-proofing — that’s what we have to do,” he responds.

Among the W&LT (Wild & Lethal Trash) spectacles broadcast on the monitors was his unforgettable spring 1998 show in Paris, which featured shrouded, alien-like models on stilts and ballroom dancers in acid-green gas masks.

But even when Van Beirendonck lost his once-powerful backer, the German jeans giant Mustang, he carried on, snapping up old curtain fabrics from a store that went bust on Antwerp’s Nationalestraat, and whipping up a characteristically zany, colorful and positive collection. According to Burloot, the message is: “Never give up. That’s also very Belgian.”

Van Saene reprised one of his lo-fi conveyor belt fashion shows, a trio of mannequins whirling around two bicycle-rim gears in front of an audience of mannequins also dressed in his couture-esque designs, their faces hand-painted into leering or impassive expressions.

According to Cockx, the installation can be read as a wry commentary on “the fact that the audience is becoming almost more important and getting more attention — who is front row, who is second row — than what is actually shown on the catwalk today.”

Van Noten selected about a dozen looks, arranging them against a vast video wall broadcasting the finales of his fashion shows, which were typically spectacular. Tucked in a niche behind one wall is a selection of his accessories, displayed in the same “curiosity cabinet” format as in the brand’s boutiques.

“For all of them, you feel one signature, and you feel their creative world,” Debo commented. “It’s very consistent, but very different.”

Yee, the most obscure of the Six but an inspiration to all in the group, was known as a “queen of collage,” a masterful illustrator, and someone who “hesitated between fashion and art,” according to Burloot.

Before her passing, she and Burloot settled on displaying a representation of her cluttered work space, a jumble of carefully curated objects, sketches and phrases. “It represents so much the creativity of Marina,” he said.

Demeulemeester’s display — 30 mannequins dressed in black and dramatically lit by spotlights — packs an emotional wallop and brings an immediate lump to the throat, her clothes telegraphing an elegance, poetry, restraint and dignity that is uniquely hers.

“How much you can do with one color!” Cockx exclaimed.

Asked about her impressions of the exhibition and the designs of the other five, Demeulemeester replied: “I can say I recognize everybody in his work, and people don’t change… In school, they were already what they are today — the seed of what they have become was already there. One evolves, but yeah, the personal taste, the personal look, stays.”

Van Noten echoed her sentiment, stressing that “Antwerp fashion was never about a single, defined style.”

“It would be impossible to replicate what happened back then. The success came from a unique combination of circumstances, the right timing, and the right energy,” he said. “We were a group of ambitious young people determined to make something happen.”

According to Van Beirendonck, the Antwerp Six emerged “spontaneously from a naïve ambition.”

“Our enthusiasm was real. No marketing. No commercial strategy,” he said. “It was pure love for what we call fashion — and for something that goes far beyond designing clothes alone.”

Indeed, their indelible signatures carry over into the penultimate room of the exhibition, which displays show invitations: Demeuleemster’s moody and flecked with shadows and feather motifs; Van Saene’s pieced together like some ransom note, reflecting the tongue-in-cheek humor he poured into his clothes.

The exhibition does not delve into many business particulars, though all of the Antwerp Six have seen highs and lows.

Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester and Walter Van Beirendonck remain pillars of Paris Fashion Week, though Van Noten stepped down in 2024, passing the design reins to Julian Klausner, and Ann Demeulemeester is now designed by Italian designer Stefano Gallici. (She hung up her scissors in 2013 and devotes herself mainly to homewares with Belgian firm Serax.)

Dirk Bikkembergs continues to show seasonal collections at its Milan showroom, though the founder left his company in 2011, and successive creative directors have carried on his work. Next month, the company celebrates the 30th anniversary of his iconic soccer shoe.

Yee and Van Saene quickly veered toward art and other creative pursuits beyond fashion, though Yee recently returned to making clothes.

About five years ago, she met serial Belgian fashion entrepreneur Rafael Adriaensens, who offered to take care of production and distribution, leaving her free to create, according to Burloot.

“The drama is that now her career took off. It’s successful, but it continues,” he said. “And she left so much, tons of drawings, that Raf says there is enough inspiration for the coming five years at least.”