Today marks the start of the very first edition of the Antwerp.Fashion Festival , featuring over 100 different shows, installations and performances. The aim: to put local talent on the radar of international fashion professionals and the domestic audience. The first day opens with a striking ‘thank you’: top designer Walter Van Beirendonck is giving Paris Fashion Week a miss for once and is showing his latest collection in Antwerp’s Boerentoren instead.
Antwerp Fashion Festival draws the international press to Belgium, Walter Van Beirendonck and co give Paris a miss
Colin Clapson
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This evening Van Beirendonck, one of the legendary Antwerp Six, is presenting an anniversary show to mark his 40-year career. The show, entitled ‘40 Years Dreaming The World Awake’, brings together designs from his entire career and concludes with his latest collection.
And so, he will be giving the Paris Men’s Fashion Week a miss for once. The designer sees the show in his home city as “a gift to the city and to the people of Belgium”, as a way of giving something back to the city and his community.
International attention for Antwerp fashion
The timing is no coincidence. Just a short distance away, at the Antwerp Fashion Museum, a retrospective exhibition entitled ‘The Antwerp Six’ is currently on display, focusing on Van Beirendonck and his fellow designers who graduated from the fashion department of the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s.
“And so this is the perfect opportunity to celebrate 40 years of Walter Van Beirendonck in our own city,” he says.
The choice of Van Beirendonck is symbolic of what the Antwerp.Fashion Festival aims to be: four days to put Antwerp firmly back in the spotlight as an international hub for fashion talent.
According to Stefan Ceunen of Flanders District of Creativity, which is organising the festival in collaboration with the City of Antwerp and fashion museum MoMu, the festival offers an international platform to local designers. “Yesterday, around 50 foreign journalists and a group of buyers arrived to view our designers’ shows and installations,” he says enthusiastically. “We even had to turn people away because there weren’t enough seats.”
Alongside Van Beirendonck, dozens of designers are showcasing their best work in various forms. With exclusive shows by designers Christian Wijnants, Jan Van Essche, Brandon Wen and Façon Jacmin. But also installations by Julie Kegels, Florentina Leitner and visual artist Tom Van der Borght, who, among other things, is creating a gigantic inflatable artwork at Central Station.