The Antwerp Six exhibition at MoMu – Fashion Museum Antwerp
MoMu – Antwerp Fashion Museum celebrates the Antwerp Six Designers with a big report dedicated to their arts and stories. 40 years after the group’s London debut, the museum is highlighting their work in an authorized exhibition, which will run from 28 March 2026 to 17 January 2027. It is the first time all six have come together for an in-depth survey of their individual paths and collective impact on the design and fashion industry. The exhibition begins 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 that time it was going through a period of rapid change and Parisian haute couture still dominated, but it was challenged from many directions at the same time: the punk that arrived from London with Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the new romantic scene that flourished in clubs like The Blitz, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, the young people sending the Italian Arms1 and the Italian Armsani1 redefining menswear. The students of Antwerp traveled to all 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 took different directions over time.
images courtesy of MoMu – Antwerp Fashion Museum | The Antwerp Six, 1986 © Karel Fonteyne
Major show tracing the artists’ arts and stories
The economic context also matters, and MoMu report dedicated to the Six of Antwerp 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 investing 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 this connection between politics, industry and creative discovery, until each of the six arrived at fashion from a different position. Dries Van Noten created 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 the luxury conglomerate.
Ann Demeulemeester worked in black, with asymmetry and in the space between strength and fragility, bringing an impactful and poetic feel to the style. Walter Van Beirendonck built a practice around the body as a space of imagination, using colour, scale and provocation to ask questions about identity, desire and politics through clothing. Dirk Bikkembergs anchored his work in sports, architecture and a rugged masculinity and was one of the first designers to take sportswear seriously as a design language rather than 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 fashion framework. What the show argues, through what MoMu describes as spectacular scenography, is that the Antwerp Six have become a cultural landmark. MoMu director Kaat Debo describes how the Six helped shape recent fashion history, and the exhibition gives that history a space for viewers to walk through.
The Antwerp Six, 1985 © Patrick Robyn
The Antwerp Six, 1987, published in WWD © Philippe Costes
project information:
name: The Antwerp Six
museum: MoMu – Antwerp Fashion Museum | @momuantwerp
dates: March 28, 2026 to January 17, 2027
location: Nationalestraat 28, 2000 Antwerp, Belgium
