What’s in a name? The promotion of The Antwerp 6

In 2007 the Flemish Parliament hosted the 6+ Antwerp Fashion exhibition, a show tracing the development and impact of Flemish fashion focusing almost exclusively on graduates from the Antwerp Fashion Academy. The 6 in the title refers to the now mythical Antwerp Six the six fashion designers and Antwerp Academy graduates Dries van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter van Beirendonck, Marina Yee and Ann Demeulemeester who burst onto the international fashion stage in the mid 1980s and transformed Belgium, and Antwerp in particular, into ‘‘the world’s unlikeliest fashion capital’’ (Elle UK,October 1987).

That‘‘official’’version of events, that one that keeps being repeated, is a nice story; a story about a small country that most people have only driven through,rising to the top echelons of fashion cool thanks to the creative genius of six friends who all studied together at the Fashion Academy and who one day drove to London in a big old van and within a week, to everyone’s surprise, conquered the world of fashion, and more importantly established‘‘Belgian Fashion’’ both as a concept and a reality. The story of this apparent(fashion) revolution is one that is still repeated and heavily relied on today in terms of the promotion of Antwerp as a fashion city and the promotion of Belgian Fashion world-wide full stop. By examining press materials from the 1980s, and juxtaposing these with later journalistic copy, this paper wishes to question and to challenge certain aspects of the ‘‘official’’version. Not for its own sake but to try and establish the wider context to this enduring myth.

The focus on and the blind belief in this oversimplified version of events by those who repeat it, may have resulted in not all of those involved in the story of TheSix being given the credit they deserve in helping stage this fashion revolution, and in establishing and branding Belgian Fashion. More importantly it has promoted a one-sided view of Belgian Fashion which opposes any reading that places it within the culture of fashion.