Few truly know the European city where fashion and architecture coexist best

Forty years after the Antwerp Six — the group of designers who in the 1980s transformed Antwerp into a global fashion capital — the Belgian city continues to live in a strange tension. On one hand, the international myth built around those names; on the other, a nature that is still silent, collected, almost anti-spectacular.

This is told by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where everything — or almost — began, the MoMu, the city's great fashion museum today hosting the exhibition dedicated to the Antwerp Six, but also the network of independent studios, galleries, and repurposed spaces that cross Antwerp and its surroundings. Among these is Kanaal, a massive architectural project developed just outside the city.

It is precisely here that one of the most interesting aspects of Antwerp emerges: the ability to transform intimacy into a true creative infrastructure. 

In the background, there is a continuous friction between the historical construction of a strongly spectacular imaginary linked to the Antwerp Six and the current nature of the city, which seems instead to function through a network of decentralized, almost invisible spaces.

How did such a compact reality become a global epicenter of fashion and, more generally, such a specific creative ecosystem?

The MoMu tells very well the economic and cultural conditions that allowed Belgium to come out of its shell in the 1980s, with the explosion of Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Marina Yee, when the international press still wondered exactly where the country was located.

And yet that silent, collected, anti-spectacular Antwerp still emerges today from the characters maintained by the designers themselves, almost in contrast to the explosive myth that continues to hover around them and dominate the city: from the posters on bins to the photographs by photographer Patrick Robyn in vintage windows — which tangibly celebrate the heritage of the maisons through vast archives — to the flagship stores of Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester, the only two brands still in existence after the founders' departure, which treat retail as a spatial experience and interiors as an extension of their own poetics.

Antwerp has treasured the radical gesture represented by the Antwerp Six, only to return to a condition of withdrawal, concentration, and slowness. An aspect that also crosses their careers: over time they have all left fashion or have progressively moved away from its overexposure.

With this extraordinary influx of international public, present but barely perceived, thanks to the exhibition “The Antwerp Six”, Antwerp is today once again observed, crossed, consumed. The real question, however, is not what is being exhibited today in the Belgian city, but what makes it possible for all this to continue happening right here.

Antwerp did not become a fashion capital by size, but by relational density. Physical proximity has favored contamination; accessibility, the permeability between students, designers, institutions, and artists. These are still the factors that constitute its hallmark today.

Even if art and fashion are breathed everywhere, everything happens in a much quieter way compared to cities like Paris, which has always been looked to. Even the MoMu presents itself as an unassuming and not at all monumental structure, an architecturally and conceptually perfect envelope for what it holds.

The tension between spectacularity and intimacy crossed Antwerp even before the construction of its contemporary fashion imaginary. Maison Guiette, the only house designed by Le Corbusier in Belgium, fits as a foreign body into the city's residential fabric: an isolated modernist gesture, designed in 1926 as a studio and home for the painter and art critic René Guiette.

Today, observed from a distance, the house no longer appears as an exception but as the first signal of an urban condition that alternates iconic elements with a deeply domestic and diffused structure.

This building does not only belong to the history of architecture but continues to resonate with the fashion system also thanks to the figure of Ann Demeulemeester, who drew inspiration for her creations from this residence.

Certain sensitivities — rigor, essentiality, relationship with space — thus cross architecture and fashion and re-emerge in unexpected ways.

The Sofie Van de Velde gallery perfectly represents this bridge between art and fashion.

This is also demonstrated by the exhibition dedicated to Marina Yee, the most enigmatic and silent figure of the Antwerp Six, who passed away last year. For Yee, the process was more important than the result: her work, based on intuition, integrity, and quiet, progressively moved away from the international scene to pursue a more introspective practice, where fashion, collage, installation, and assembly continued to coexist.

No interest in big statements, only silent but determined gestures.

Trying to get out of her comfort zone, fighting against unnecessary popularity, was what guided the artist throughout her existence, considering modesty and simplicity essential conditions for beauty.

Speaking precisely of this dimension, Dewi de Brouwer, Gallery Manager at Sofie Van de Velde, explains how this transversality is something extremely natural in Antwerp and that it immediately struck her as well when she moved from the Netherlands.

“It's not the result of a particular strategy,” she explains. “It all starts from visceral emotions. There's no initial pretension; on the contrary, Belgian artists often tend to underestimate themselves far too much, possessed of an impressive humility that distinguishes them.”

This same idea of intimacy finds perhaps its most extreme form at Kanaal, the large industrial complex repurposed by the Axel Vervoordt Company in Wijnegem, just outside Antwerp. A former distillery and then malthouse overlooking the Albert canal, Kanaal today does not present itself as an institution but as a true spatial condition: a system of voids, water, concrete, bricks, greenery, and converted industrial volumes in a slow perceptual experience.

Here the visitor, thanks to a badge that allows entry into the different structures, becomes the master of their own time. The 55,000-square-meter complex, conceived in collaboration with architects Stéphane Beel, Coussée & Goris, and Bogdan & Van Broeck, landscape architect Michel Desvigne, and architect Tatsuro Miki, was built on a philosophy of sharing art as a source of introspection, inspiration, and peace.

Between private homes and shared courtyards, exhibition spaces emerge, from the eight concrete silos dedicated to the gallery's artists to the permanent installations by James Turrell and Anish Kapoor, respectively located in a decommissioned chapel and a circular building historically used for grain storage.

This architectural diversity continuously dissolves the boundary between public and private. Even the vegetation, designed to protect privacy, contributes to building a form of diffused intimacy, making contemplation an integral part of daily life.

It is evident, then, how the design of intimacy in Antwerp does not translate into a form of closure, but into the ability to create concentration, permeability, and continuity between disciplines, people, and urban space.

And as happened with the Antwerp Six, the spectacle then follows.