On the Antwerp Six

In 1986, a handful of graduates from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp loaded a truck and drove to London for fashion week. Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee. The British press could not pronounce their names, so they collapsed them into the Antwerp Six. The label stuck. The work stuck harder.

What they did was quiet but radical. They rejected the polish of Paris and Milan in favour of something rawer, more conceptual, more concerned with cut and idea than with seasonal spectacle. Black on black. Asymmetry. Workwear lifted into something almost religious. Looking at their early shows now, you can see the entire grammar of contemporary independent fashion already on the runway, decades before the rest of the industry caught up.

My favourites among them, and beyond them, are Raf Simons and Ann Demeulemeester. Raf is not technically one of the original Six, but he came up in that same world, interned under Walter Van Beirendonck, and absorbed the Antwerp sensibility so completely that his early work feels like a natural extension of what they started. His menswear collections in the late 1990s built a silhouette that the next twenty years of fashion borrowed from without ever quite paying back. Long, lean, slightly fragile, dressed for a basement venue.

Ann Demeulemeester is the soul of it for me. Her work is poetic in a way that fashion rarely allows itself to be. Feathers, asymmetric drapes, white shirts that look like they have been worn for a decade, boots that look made for walking out of a relationship. She built a wardrobe for people who read too much and feel everything, and she made it look effortless.

What makes the Antwerp influence so interesting from a marketing point of view is how thoroughly it bled into music. Raf Simons dressed Kraftwerk, referenced Manic Street Preachers and New Order on his runways, and his collections became uniforms for a whole generation of indie and post-punk listeners. Ann Demeulemeester was photographed endlessly with Patti Smith, whose look and her look were almost indistinguishable, two artists co-authoring a silhouette. Bikkembergs put football and subculture into tailoring. Dries quoted folk music and global textile traditions long before that became standard.

The influence is still everywhere if you know where to look. Artists like fakemink literally namecheck Ann Demeulemeester in their songs, Easter Pink opens with "bad bitch in the Ann Demeulemeester zip." It is not a fashion reference for clout, it is just part of the vocabulary now. And Raf, of course, is everywhere. Travis Scott, A$AP Rocky, Kanye, they have all worn Raf so consistently that his pieces have become a kind of uniform for a certain kind of artist. The clothes are not borrowed for a red carpet, they are lived in.