Except for the gong, it is completely silent in the dome of the Botanic Sanctuary in Antwerp. A buzzing volume fills the room, a high-pitched female voice starts, and next to it a man plays exotic instruments. The first model enters in deep contemplation — arms crossed behind her, gaze on her feet — wearing loose trousers and a black waistcoat, held together with a delicate moss-green silk thread.
What happens next seems like a family constellation. Each model is given a place in the room and instructed to relate to the other, with the theatricality of a Galliano show: long steps, everything in slow motion. Two gentlemen in complementary outfits revolve around each other’s axis. Leather and lacquer look at each other. Persian carpets connect with kimonos: shahs and geishas. Furry faux fur sleeves hang from a men’s vest with brocade-like floral fabric. Nadav Perlman, who graduated from the Royal Academy in 2021, wants to use his fashion to bridge differences between cultures, different types of people, the present and the past.
Experience
Perlman’s performance will officially open the Antwerp Fashion Festival on Friday, June 5. He is one of a pool of talents through which you can call Antwerp a fashion city. The good image of Belgian fashion is still too closely linked to the success of ‘The Antwerp Six’ from forty years ago. With the festival, from June 4 to 7, the city celebrates a breath of fresh air on top of that heritage. Presentations, installations, talks and exhibitions can be seen at 85 locations, and specially decorated shop windows can be viewed. Pit stops can be recognized by signboards in primary colors — bright yellow, petrol, hot pink — with ‘Antwerp Fashion Festival’ in italics. There hasn’t been anything like it since 2009. So things are going crazy.
The program demonstrates the progressive intentions of the organization, driven by Flanders District of Creativity. Ultimately, it should give Belgian retail a boost, but first the image of contemporary, independent Belgian fashion must be sharpened. Hence the focus on a broad audience, with art and experience in addition to clothing. It didn’t have to be a ‘fashion week’, Elke Timmermans explains. She also helped revamp Berlin Fashion Week with exciting show locations and community building — she took that blueprint with her. “We are far too close to Paris. There is no interest in another Fashion Week.” Instead, Flanders looked for an approach on which the fashion city can rely from culture and activity.
Visitors come from France, England, Italy and the Netherlands. Ambrose Jude Van Tiberias, all-round creative in fashion, is impressed. “Compared to the commercial character in Amsterdam, fashion here is more based on craft. I feel a kind of spark of joy — there is hope and future potential for its own, creative, independent industry. The level of fashion here no longer exists in Amsterdam.”
More accessible than Paris
At the intimate presentation of Jan Jan van Essche in the Music Museum Vleeshuis, Bas Slootman and Alexandra Schott are gaining inspiration for their new fashion platform Arcatype. Designers often stand next to their work, and that adds something, they think. “Hearing their story so directly helps you understand the design philosophy better. Even if it’s not entirely your own aesthetic, you can appreciate the thinking behind it.”
They find the elegance of Belgian fashion intriguing. “There is very little left of that in the Netherlands.” Slootman points to the installation of Kié Einzelgänger in Tommy Simoens’ gallery, a dilapidated commercial building over four floors. “The quality of the clothes was second to none, the concept was well thought out. It made a deep impression on me.”
For Schott, the city is a relief compared to hautain Paris. She studied fashion design in New York and is looking for other perspectives at the festival. “Antwerp offers accessibility, it is less confrontational than Paris, with all its luxury houses. This makes it easier for designers to challenge the fashion image.”
Heart of the city
The festival also pays tribute to the city and its architecture. Marie Bernadette Woehrl gives her theater performance with dancers and an opera song in the pouring rain, in an old castle garden behind the Ercola art center. In Het Huis Happaert, fashion brand Bernadette, from mother and daughter Bernadette and Charlotte De Geyter, shows a short analogue fashion film: The Hostess. For the screening, you lift a heavy velvet curtain. Behind it are the stately gowns of the bored main characters on display.
A real attraction is La Collection: contemporary fashion in an impressive avant-garde building of the Ruys jewelery family, designed by architect Ferdinand Truyman. Downstairs, hemp silk draperies and sharp suit jackets sit next to historic sewing machines, flasks and Art Nouveau arrows. The shop assistant is busy, although she cannot say whether such a distracting monument will result in more sales.
Antwerp is synonymous with stateliness, as a historic port and trading city, home to Peter Paul Rubens and the diamond industry. At the same time, an equally rich modern ‘vibe’ manifests itself: in design concept stores, countless coffee shops, and the undulating glass facade of the Provincial House, where Christian Wijnant shows on the roof. In the prominent galleries on the Waalsekaai — and especially those of Sofie van de Velde. This month you can get Walter van Beirendonck’s sketches for 700 euros each.
Up-and-coming talent Julie Kegels explains her work with an art installation in the modern Cour Gallery. For “After Work,” she transformed the space into the living room of her hypothetical female client — a busy bee, always busy. She also pokes fun at the way the fashion business aestheticizes everything: make-up stains on the bed, a stray stiletto. An artistic, daring choice; no new fashion is involved.
Talent
In three days the visitor is presented with promising talent. Marcel Sommer makes his dark debut in the church, with bright backlights like purgatory from the wings. Florentina Leitner built a playful installation for the MoMu: models on a silver foil castle, hugged under the arm. ‘You are a Star’ is written on the T-shirt. Tom Van Der Borght brightened up interior design store Donum with inclusive mannequins, and provided the Antwerp Central station hall with an inflatable: a Ponyfish the length of a bus.
Art museum KMSKA had recently graduated talents come up with fashion for self-selected works of art. Some also participate in The Carousel, a digital fashion show on free-standing screens designed by Shoottheartist, funded by Porsche — outside on the street, also for people from the suburbs. “I think that’s cool,” says fashion photographer and producer Bjorn Tagemose. In the dome he feels the spirit of the Antwerp Six, especially that of Marina Yee.
“Just like this new generation, they wanted to do everything they could. At the stock exchange in London, forty years ago, the Six were on the first floor and no one came to see them. It was Marina who went downstairs and got everyone upstairs, whereupon the English press wrote: this is underground. What happens there is cool.” He feels the same about new faces such as Pommie Dierick, Facon Jacmin and Mattia van Severen.
It is a high art to connect Antwerp’s fashion heritage with the new. The exhibition about the Antwerp Six at the MoMu is highlighted in bright pink in the program booklet — young talent feels supported in their footsteps. It all comes back again at the sold-out show of the academy students, given twice over the weekend. Students hope to be associated with the activism of Yee — a pioneer in upcycling vintage pearls — and the rich materiality of Dries van Noten, steeped in historical references, without becoming more stuffy.
W for Walter
And what kind of fashion city is Antwerp without Walter van Beirendonck? He also asked himself that question, and answered it with a home game for his 40th anniversary show, in a ruined Boerentoren on Thursday evening. Heels are prohibited, tickets are difficult to obtain. The show is at seven high. Heavy applause comes before and during the show from veterans — a moved Ann Demeulemeester in the front row.
Exuberantly cheerful knitwear from forty years of work passes by on the gray concrete floor, from long sweaters with protest texts against the manosphere (‘Bad Bad Boys’, AW 1986-1987) to the full-body floral knits in ‘Scarecrow’ (AW 2026-2027). In the show notes, Van Beirendonck puts joy and hope first. Tonight I’m showing 40 years of dreams. The masks, the monsters, the lovers, the warriors, the dreamers. 40 years of fantasy with a fist.
In many ways he is the shining center of the festival — celebrating fashion through the collection and his presence at other stops, in conversation with visitors. There is nothing nostalgic about his presentation, he later explains to Sofie van de Velde. His show merely proves that imagination knows no age, and that fashion has an important function. “A whole life can be spent dreaming the world awake.”
