Experts Decode Why Belgian Born or Trained Fashion Designers Rule

Possessed of a steely resolve, clear design signatures and an ability to tell vivid stories with wearable clothes, Belgian and Belgium-trained designers are ruling the roost in fashion today.

“I think it’s the right moment for them because we are in a period when it’s very important to express yourself in fashion. And they learned how to work with garments in a way [that] is very expressive,” said Walter Van Beirendonck, one of the original Antwerp Six who catapulted a small European city to global fashion fame 40 years ago. “Fashion needs this kind of deeper thinking.”

He was interviewed Friday night at the opening of an exhibition dedicated to The Antwerp Six at MoMu, where other designers, educators and curators were quizzed about the enormous impact of the nation and graduates of its famous schools — the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and La Cambre in Brussels.

Chanel, Hermès, Gucci, Prada, Saint Laurent, Versace, Balmain, Tom Ford, Maison Margiela, Diesel, Rabanne and Marni are just some of the European houses that currently boast Belgian-born or Belgium-schooled designers at the helm — not forgetting such notable homegrown talents as Kris Van Assche, Olivier Theyskens, Christian Wijnants, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Julie Kegels and Marie Adam-Leenaerdt, to name but a few.

Van Beirendonck and other key members of the Six — headlined by Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester — remain fixtures of Paris Fashion Week, even if the latter two have retired from the runway and passed the design reins to other talents.

“You go to Britain for a concept; to France for something [that] is about the body; to Italy for fabrics; America for sportswear. What you come to Belgium for is a combination of the intellect and the practicality,” said milliner Stephen Jones, who has done otherworldly toppers for Van Beirendonck for decades. “It’s not that they’re not ambitious, but they go for the solid, long path.”

What’s more, “it’s not about this season or the fabulous image, it’s actually about making something that people want to buy,” Jones said in an interview. “The reason they have a business is because people wanted to wear their clothes. It wasn’t PR puff.…There is a steadfastness.”

Belgians “often find the right balance between dream and reality,” Van Noten agreed. “It’s always quite grounded.

“We had to do things in a different way because we were not part of the fashion system,” he explained. “We questioned the fashion system: how things are made, sold, promoted, communicated.

“For me, it all became clear the moment I started to do fashion shows, because fashion shows gave me really the possibility to tell a full story, that it was not only making clothes, but also you were showing the type of models, the lighting, the hair, the makeup, the music. It was really kind of like making a play,” he enthused.

“I think it’s always good to be a little bit of an outsider and Antwerp was, at that time [when The Antwerp Six emerged], it was not really a fashion city,” agreed Linda Loppa, who has helmed the MoMu fashion museum and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts’ fashion school in her long career, which started as a designer and retailer. “But it was always a city based on art and culture.”

One of the world’s major seaports, Antwerp has long welcomed and hosted new industries — whether the diamond trade or printing — plus new thinking in science, philosophy and the arts.

“We are probably a culture that takes things seriously, whether it’s food, art, literature, fashion design or industrial design,” Loppa said. “In that sense, it makes it more profound what we do.”

Most observers also pointed to the quality of fashion and design educations in Belgium, including Raf Simons, who studied industrial and furniture design at Genk’s LUCA School of Arts, and Pieter Mulier, an architecture graduate from the Brussels Institut Saint-Luc.

“I think our education system is different. It’s less molding, it’s much more open and interdisciplinary,” said Mulier, who spent most of his fashion career working with Simons — at his signature label, Jil Sander, Christian Dior and Calvin Klein — before taking the design helm of Maison Alaïa and, starting July 1, Versace.

Mulier also credited The Antwerp Six for pioneering a pathway that has inspired generations of designers.

“We grew up with all of this, [the Six] showing that it was possible to do something different and still succeed internationally,” he said. “They were not the first; the Japanese [designers] came before. But it showed us that everything is possible from a small country. We’re in Flanders. It’s even smaller than Belgium.”

Simons, co-creative director of Prada since 2020, agreed the example of the Six, plus maverick Belgian designer Martin Margiela, provided much “motivation and stimulation” early in his career. “I was in the middle of the situation because I did an internship at Walter [Van Beirendonck] for two years,” he related in an interview.

The Neerpelt-born designer said having experienced “the smallness of it, or relative smallness of it compared to businesses today,” made entering fashion seem less daunting than it might be today.

“When I started in ’95, I was still very naive and thinking like, ‘Let’s just make clothes and hopefully a few people will like it,’” he said. “That was more the thinking. We weren’t thinking about structures and shows.”

Wijnants, who graduated from the Royal Academy in 2000 and launched his eponymous label in 2003, did not mince words about how demanding his fashion education was.

“It’s so competitive, and the level is quite high. When I studied there, there were about 200 people applying, only 60 got in in the first year, and we graduated with 12 people,” he said in an interview at his Antwerp boutique. “So you work really hard to to succeed and to progress to the next year. It was a healthy competition, but it was very stressful. I think that helps building really strong designers who can survive.”

Students were taught to never be satisfied with their designs, and compelled by professors to “go further and further, make it stronger, make it even better, being very perfectionist,” he recalled.

They were also compelled to drill down to discover their own true style.

“What they teach you in the academy is to be authentic. I think this word ‘authentic’ is really what describes best the designers in Belgium, because everybody’s just doing his or her own thing and not looking to the left or to the right,” Wijnants said.

Van Beirendonck, who was head of the Royal Academy’s fashion department from to 2007 until 2022, called “storytelling” a key element of the education.

“We try to go very deep, and [students] have the possibility over four years to really work on the signature and go very deep in their own world,” he said. “It’s a very important period in their life to have the possibility to develop their own signatures. You work very intensely together with your teachers, and you have to create an opinion, you have to present your garments. It’s very intense and very demanding also.”

Kaat Debo, director of MoMu, noted that the Royal Academy has “internationalized like crazy” since the days of The Antwerp Six, now attracting students of more than 35 different nationalities.

“The school has the luxury of attracting top talent from all over the world — and that’s an important evolution,” she said. “But they really focus on an individual approach — a lot of one-to-one. Teaching drawing is still a very important element in the training and, of course, finding your own signature.”

According to Floriane de Saint Pierre, who operates a namesake executive search and consulting firm in Paris, it’s key to understand “the path to recognition.”

While The Antwerp Six were propelled by wide press coverage and powerful multibrand retailers hungry for new stories, subsequent generations of Belgian- or Belgium-trained creative directors benefited from fashion awards, particularly the ANDAM prize, or from launching their own brands in Paris, as Anthony Vaccarello did before joining Saint Laurent; Haider Ackermann before being recruited by Berluti, Canada Goose or Tom Ford, and Demna with Vetements before being snatched up by Balenciaga and later Gucci.

Others received “in-house professional development” at a key training ground like Maison Margiela, where the likes of Nadège Vanhée (Hermès), Julian Klausner (Dries Van Noten) and Matthieu Blazy (Chanel) all got their start. (Like Mulier, Blazy also worked under Simon, who spawned his own unofficial fashion school.)

Also, since Belgium did not have an established heritage of fashion houses upon which to build, the creative education there unites “intellect, function — quite a few come from architecture or design — and a prescient sense of where society was heading,” de Saint Pierre said.

Meryll Rogge, who founded her signature label six years ago and is also the creative director of Marni in Milan, credited her Belgian fashion education for learning how to think independently.

“There’s no strict guideline on how to behave as a Belgian designer,” she said. “Everybody really follows his own intuition and way to create.”

In addition, “Belgians do have quite a hard work ethic. And the passion surpasses the ego,” she said. “The passion for the craft and for the job is the most important thing for us, more than the networking or the glamour. We’re in it for what it is.”