The Antwerp Six at MoMu seen by Annalise June Kamegawa

Words Annalise June Kamegawa

No one expected six designers to come from Belgium: this sentiment appeared again and again in the exhibition ‘The Antwerp Six’ at MoMu - Fashion Museum Antwerp. It was the eighties and the fashion scene was abuzz with Vivienne Westwood in London, Gianni Versace from Milan, and Thierry Mugler in Paris. To have this group of radical young designers – Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee – all coming from a university in a city that wasn’t yet synonymous for aesthetic prowess, shocked the fashion world.

But it was exactly that geographic and temporal context, a confluence of a revitalized textile industry, a network of mentors, and a verve for garment creation, that incited this moment in fashion history.

The exhibition opens to their ceiling high portraits, shot by Patrick Robyn, Demeulemeester partner, for the second Golden Spindle competition in 1983. They’re captured in a gritty monochrome that reveals their visages with just the slightest white gestures. Entering the exhibition, an archive bursts out from succinct timeline that traces the curving walls. It starts in the middle of the 20th century, outlining the socio-cultural temperature in Belgium at the time, explaining how the radical forms of dissent that were at a height around the world were manifesting in the European country.

The journey moves into the eighties, creating a picture of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, the university that brought together The Six. CRT televisions embedded into the wall play videos of students in the university’s studios, equipped with sketches, samples, and industrial sewing machines. There are images of the academy’s first shows, drawings from the designers’ sketchbooks in their early years of practice, and newspaper clippings regaling tales of successful alumni. All the while, the images are put in dialogue with the world events that are creating the dominant culture at the time: Devo album releases, the debut of David Lynch’s Erasure Head, a seasonal rolling-out of Jean Paul-Gaultier campaigns.

In the hodgepodge of ephemera, there’s a palpable air of the environment these young designers, at the onset of their career, would have been engulfed by. One can almost imagine how sticky the floors would have been at Today Place, the bar and performance space that welcomed the underground scene in the eighties. There’s an air of mystique around the invitations to the avant-garde fashion shows at the clothing shop, The Poor Millionaire.

One of the best pieces in the show is a forged invite to the Jean Paul Gaultier A/W 1982-83 show made with red paper, a safety pin, and the lid of a yogurt container from the archive of Walter Van Beirendonck and Dirk Van Saene. Using these makeshift invites, they snuck their way into the Parisian show of the designer they had held in high regard. In the show, there’s also the forged invites to the Thierry Mugler A/W 1982–83 show and the Claude Montana S/S 1982 show.

So when The Six packed themselves into a van and made their way to London in 1986, this sense of comradery feels like a logical result of their mischievous and silly adventures as students and contemporaries. It should be noted that their ever-mysterious classmate Martin Margiela, who’s often considered a +1 to the group, wasn’t present in London.

In the main part of the exhibition, six rooms that each hold pieces spanning the respective designers’ careers, there’s a sense of creative explosion. There’s a recreation of the late Marina Yee’s eclectic studio space with sketches and scrap materials overflowing onto every surface. Anne Demulemeester’s mannequins are presented dressed entirely in black, with just the subtle finishes of the materials – leather, sequins, feathers, tailoring – distinguishing each piece. Muscular and athletic men decorate the display of Dirk Bikkembergs’ works.

The very last room of the exhibition displayed a collection of invitations and advertisements for their shows. It was like this ribbon that tied the event together as it reiterated how their approach to fashion wasn’t just garments, but it was world building. Even down to the smallest feather on an invitation, a hand drawn advertorial poster, or the pressed flower petals sent by post. Each of these objects, advertisements or otherwise, functioned like offshoots or artifacts from the universes the designers managed to create.

There’s a lingering feeling walking out of the exhibition: this was a very particular moment that couldn’t possibly be replicated. So many things had puzzle-pieced together for these six designers to come onto the scene in unison. Yet it must be remembered that even in the mid-eighties, the group was met with surprise.

They had somehow broken through the status quo, not one by one, but together, and worked alongside each other to create a movement that was greater than the sum of its parts.