The Antwerp Six exhibition at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp
The MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp celebrates the Antwerp Six designers with a major exhibition dedicated to their crafts and histories. 40 years after the group’s London debut, the museum highlights their works in an authorized show, which runs on March 28th, 2026 through January 17th, 2027. It is the first time all six have been brought together for an in-depth survey of their individual paths and collective impact in the design and fashion industry. The exhibition starts in Antwerp in the 1970s, when Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee were still students.
Fashion at the time was moving through a period of rapid change, and the parisian haute couture still dominated, but it was being challenged from multiple directions at once: punk arriving from London with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the New Romantic scene flowering in clubs like The Blitz, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo sending shockwaves through Paris in 1981, young Italians like Versace and Armani redefining menswear. The Antwerp students traveled to all of these cities. They went to the shows, the clubs, the record stores, and brought those influences back to a city that had its own experimental art scene and a nightlife that kept the Academy students in close contact with each other, even as their individual work pulled in different directions over time.
images courtesy of MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp | The Antwerp Six, 1986 © Karel Fonteyne
Major show that traces the designers’ crafts and histories
The economic context matters too, and the MoMu exhibition dedicated to the Antwerp Six addresses it directly. When they graduated in the early 1980s, Belgium’s clothing and textile industry was struggling, and the government launched a five-year Textile Plan that included investment in young designers through competitions like the Golden Spindle and a national campaign called Mode, dit is Belgisch — Fashion, this is Belgian. The exhibition traces that connection between policy, industry, and creative breakthrough, until each of the six arrived at fashion from a different position. Dries Van Noten built a language around fabric, print, and cultural layering that drew from textile traditions and translated them into wearable collections. His house, which he ran independently in Antwerp until his retirement in 2024, became one of the last major fashion labels to remain outside a luxury conglomerate.
Ann Demeulemeester worked in black, in asymmetry, and in the space between strength and fragility, carrying an influential and poetic sense in style. Walter Van Beirendonck built a practice around the body as a site of fantasy, using color, scale, and provocation to ask questions about identity, desire, and politics through clothing. Dirk Bikkembergs anchored his work in sport, architecture, and a hard-edged masculinity, and was one of the first designers to take sportswear seriously as a design language instead of a commercial category. Dirk Van Saene created a body of work defined by construction and quiet invention, while Marina Yee brought a philosophy of deconstruction and reuse to her work long before sustainability became a framework in fashion. What the show argues, through what MoMu describes as a striking scenography, is that the Antwerp Six became a cultural reference point MoMu director Kaat Debo describes the Six as having helped shape recent fashion history, and the exhibition gives that history a room to stand in for the viewers to walk through.
The Antwerp Six, 1985 © Patrick Robyn
The Antwerp Six, 1987, published in WWD © Philippe Costes
project info:
name: The Antwerp Six
museum: MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp | @momuantwerp
dates: March 28th, 2026 to January 17th, 2027
location: Nationalestraat 28, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium
The post MoMu opens major exhibition dedicated to ‘antwerp six’ designers, including dries van noten appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.