Antwerp Six: A Fashion-Architecture Map
The Antwerp Six fashion architecture is not a metaphor — it is a postcode, a 1893 department-store building at Nationalestraat 28, and a hand-drawn list of six graduates from the 1980–1981 cohort of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. On 28 March 2026, MoMu opened “The Antwerp Six”, the first museum-scale survey of the group, exactly forty years after Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee drove a rented van to the British Designer Show at Olympia and were branded, by reporters who could not pronounce their names, with the label that stuck. The exhibition runs until 17 January 2027. The building it sits inside has been holding the lineage together since 2002. Everything else in this piece is the map. ...