When considering the legacy of fashion education, Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts stands out as a premier institution. Established in 1663, it is not only one of the oldest art schools globally, but it also serves as a powerful creative hub. The Academy’s alumni list is a testament to its influence, featuring names that have become synonymous with fashion and art excellence. The renowned Antwerp Six reshaped modern fashion, while Martin Margiela, who graduated just a year earlier, revolutionized it entirely. Adding to this prestigious list are designers Kris Van Assche, Patrick Van Ommeslaeghe, Jan-Jan Van Essche, An Vandevorst, and Haider Ackermann, as well as makeup pioneer Peter Philips and acclaimed artist Luc Tuymans, highlighting the Academy’s exceptional impact relative to its size.
Greatness isn’t a formal requirement at the Academy, yet it consistently emerges from each new generation of students. The recent Master’s graduates were no exception, demonstrating resilience in a climate where limited resources and uncertainty could easily hinder personal expression and future aspirations. However, Antwerp’s enduring elegance seems to counter adversity naturally.
This spirit was vividly evident during the Antwerp Fashion Festival last weekend, a four-day event centered around the Antwerp Six exhibition at the MoMu Museum. The festival featured numerous highlights, such as a homage to Walter Van Beirendonck’s impressive 40-year career as both a designer and an influential Academy educator. The event also included debut shows, an engaging series of talks—where Dries Van Noten’s creative director Julian Klausner was particularly well-received—and various activities spread throughout the city.
The festival reached its zenith with an extensive showcase of the Royal Academy’s Bachelor and Master’s students’ collections. As a jury member, I had the privilege of experiencing 16 unique creative visions and the diverse inspirations behind them. The discussions among the jury, which included designers Olivier Theyskens, Francesco Risso, and Saul Nash, along with artists Luc Tuymans and Carla Arocha, and the Academy’s faculty and creative director Brandon Wen, were as vibrant as the collections themselves.
Theyskens emphasized the Academy’s dedication to individuality as a core strength. “I believe the institution occupies a unique space in contemporary fashion education, maintaining a strong focus on research, discipline, and creative integrity despite industry pressures,” he remarked. “The Academy hasn’t been influenced by the fashion world’s evolution.” Students are encouraged to master techniques while developing a true artistic perspective. Theyskens observed, “Across the collections, individuality took precedence over following trends, with students presenting works shaped by introspection, research, and a confident expression of their own voices.”
Risso found comfort in the Academy’s steadfast sense of purpose. Having collaborated with the Master’s students over the past year, he commended the final collections’ quality and the educational journey’s coherence, from initial classes to the graduation runway. “What impressed me most was the teachers’ and school’s commitment and humility,” he noted, advocating for increased public support for such a valuable institution.
For Risso, the Academy’s strength lies in resisting immediacy. The collections that stood out to him were those “rooted in in-depth, almost obsessive research,” maintaining a clear vision from start to finish. “In an era defined by distraction and speed, the ability to focus is crucial,” he observed. The most impactful collections turned this focus into something “surprisingly light, generous, and deeply human.”
In his collection, Bartosz Borowski drew inspiration from the chaotic world of Lucian Freud. After delving into the painter’s work, Borowski meticulously examined 12 pieces. His silhouettes reflected Freud’s chaotic studio and his candid depiction of the human body. Borowski was intrigued by the interplay between disorder and elegance in Freud’s art, using the luxurious fabric folds enveloping Freud’s subjects as a backdrop for his own aesthetic.
Yvonne Schichtel’s designs explored fragility as a form of resilience. Her work was influenced by archeologist Marija Gimbutas’s theories on ancient matrilineal societies, offering an alternative to the aggression prevalent in modern life. Schichtel advocated a return to Earth, the body, and long-marginalized knowledge forms. The idea of beauty evolving over time and love leaving marks also inspired her. These concepts manifested in delicate garments featuring ancient goddess symbols translated into cascading folds and translucent tulle layers that floated around the body. The exquisite color palette was reminiscent of a watercolor painting, with soft blush, faded rose, and muted earth tones.
A residency in Palermo sparked Vincent Körber’s creativity. He was fascinated by how Norman, Arab, Venetian, and contemporary histories coexist, layered visibly. In Palermo, grandeur and decay coexist harmoniously. Körber translated this condition into a sleek, modern wardrobe. Drawing from early 20th-century Southern Italian tailoring traditions and dramatic photography by Letizia Battaglia, Marcella Campagnano, and Franco Zecchin, he achieved a balance between bourgeois refinement and urban wear. His designs featured sophisticated construction tempered by modern ease and practicality, demonstrating that history can be worn lightly without losing substance.
Carla Lázaro Bonet’s work was rooted in her family’s female lineage and a rejection of patriarchal norms. Flowers symbolized women’s resilience, thriving in unexpected places despite limitations. Her visually striking collection emerged from hands-on experimentation with new materials, fabric appliqués, original prints, and unique surface techniques. The silhouettes expanded into monumental volumes, unapologetically bold, and confident, transforming presence into a statement of self-expression.
A photograph of Cecil Beaton in a leopard-print bathrobe ignited Lars Martens’s creativity. The image, both elegant and absurd, captured Beaton’s talent for making self-presentation an art form. Martens was inspired by Beaton’s approach to dressing as performance, pleasure, and self-invention. His collection, marked by wit and extravagance, served as an antidote to prevailing gloom and practicality. The range celebrated dressing up for its own sake, inviting wearers into a world where glamour is approached with both seriousness and irony.
Stan Peeters’s collection explored silhouettes as architectural compositions, drawing inspiration from modernist artists Marthe Donas and Alexander Archipenko, whose Cubist sculptures were defined by their interplay of voids, volumes, and open and closed shapes. This dialogue between space and form was translated into sculptural volumes, cut-outs, and structural constructions. Polished wooden accessories, developed in collaboration with his father, further extended and transformed the body, lending a decorative dimension.
A now-demolished dance hall in Guangzhou, once a hotspot for his parents’ generation’s idea of a good night out, set the tone for Feng Zhangchong’s presentation. He riffed on the golden age of Cantonese pop culture, the environment he grew up in, and the subcultures orbiting it today. A further influence on his menswear was the distinctly Cantonese sense of humor, especially the slang, which often feels designed to make outsiders feel slightly confused and insiders more than a little bit smug. That spirit runs through his creations: sharply tailored garments with a deliberate dash of mischief.
Inspired by the stark contrasts of German Expressionist cinema, the Manichean symbolism of films like Nosferatu, and unsettling artworks like Fuseli’s The Nightmare, Jeron Grünewald constructed his own narrative of unease. Echoing the structure of a classic horror film, or the logic of a waking nightmare, the offering started in white, only to be gradually overtaken by an encroaching pitch black. Tension emerged through shape and proportion; strings and hooks punctuated the garments, suggesting both constriction and release, as if the body were caught between control and collapse in a state of suspended discomfort.
Trained as a dancer, Tristan Stieners approached his presentation as if it were choreography, unbound by rules and composed from intuition rather than instruction. Reflecting on the passage of time and its influence on the perception of beauty, he balanced a sense of classicism with the fragility of the ephemeral and the slow erosion of decay. Voluminous yet weightless, his work was guided by free association, instinct, and flow: garments were conceived less as fixed objects than as traces of movement, as if echoing a dance just performed.
Men’s profound desire for closeness and connection was the driving inspiration behind Conor Turley’s narrative. Contemporary men often exist within self-imposed straightjackets, suppressing vulnerability while competing for perceived “alpha” status. Yet in history, flamboyance wasn’t a sign of weakness but a powerful expression of wealth and social standing. Questioning contemporary performances of hypermasculinity, Turley drew upon historical dress and costume traditions, reimagining them through a humorous lens. Rich in color and character, his designs challenged performative norms of masculinity while celebrating self-expression, intimacy, and theatricality.
Heavy metal music, particularly black and doom metal, served as a starting point for Mateus Wyczesany. Deliberate clashes of shapes and materials paired a restrictive leather jacket with the fluidity of silk. The front of a silhouette was sealed shut, creating a sense of claustrophobia, while the back opened up, exposing skin and offering release. Dark, forceful, and unapologetic in attitude, Wyczesany’s collection stood in compelling contrast to more lyrical and decorative expressions, underscoring the plurality of voices that emerged as one of the Academy’s strengths.
Called Unlearning Her, Suwen Liang’s lineup drew not from external references but from lived experience. Sparked by a painful heartbreak, it explored how women are shaped by domesticity and expectation, and what happens when those structures begin to unravel. Through silhouettes charged with strain and movement, the garments traced a journey from confusion to self-discovery. Domestic fixtures became unlikely protagonists: a bathroom curtain was transformed into dressmaking material, while swirls of dust beneath a vacuum cleaner found new life as fabric. A white shirt was constructed from colliding chemises, as though torn apart in a moment of fury. If heartbreak was the catalyst, self-determination was (perhaps) the final outcome.
Anna Lackner envisioned a diva on the verge of a breakdown, exhausted by the relentless pressure to appear flawless. Drawing on the spectacle of female pop stardom of the 2010s and the corrosive effects of fame and media scrutiny, the collection followed a public figure who has reached her limit. Lackner translated this fragile state into extravagant concoctions of feathers, sequins, and chiffon, looks that appeared moments away from falling apart—though hopefully not in front of the paparazzi.
Inspired by graffiti culture, Enak Baeken sought to capture its attitude of defiance, with a series of bold street-style uniforms animated by appliqué, intarsia, and live spray-painted interventions performed onstage during the show. Like graffiti itself, the collection refused to sit still, behave itself, or ask for approval.
A subtle spirit of rebellion permeated Yichun Liu’s showing. Straying from what society and family expect of a girl—obedience, stability, and a neatly mapped-out future—means venturing into the ambiguous, the fluid, and the unknown. Layered silhouettes and liquid forms suggest that wandering off course just may be the only course for her.
Inspired by the cinematic language of Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme, Byron Wang reflected on the paradox of intimacy: two people drawn toward one another, yet never quite becoming one. His garments simultaneously embraced and detached, hovering somewhere between connection and distance. Particular attention was given to the surfaces; developed as moving images in textile form, colorful jacquards drew on the work of the painter Cecily Brown, with motifs that never fully revealed themselves but appeared and dissolved at the edge of perception.
