The Antwerp Fashion Festival celebrates the city that changed fashion forever

The role of the city of Antwerp in defining contemporary fashion is now known worldwide. The MoMU is nothing less than the ultimate Mecca for those who dedicate their savings to rare archive purchases, and just a handful of months after the inauguration of the exhibition dedicated to the Antwerp Six, the city has opened its doors to the Antwerp.Fashion Festival. The event brings together shows and events, with a declared commitment to actively reclaim the legacy of Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Marina Yee, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter Van Beirendonck, and Dirk Van Saene, and to make the city recognizable to the world as a hub of emerging new talents.

An ecosystem that has few equivalents in the world

Held from June 4 to 7, 2026, the Antwerp.Fashion Festival is organized by the Flanders District of Creativity in collaboration with the MoMu (ModeMuseum Antwerpen) and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, with the support of EventFlanders. Four days dedicated to shows, events, exhibitions, and dialogues scattered throughout the city, aiming to make this festival an annual appointment to further strengthen Antwerp’s reputation in fashion worldwide, already synonymous with nonconformity and extravagance. Such a reputation is based on an ecosystem that has few equivalents in the world: the pioneering success of the Six, the vision of the fashion department at the Academy, and the international appeal of the MoMu have created the conditions for an unprecedented diaspora of talent. Pieter Mulier, Raf Simons, Glenn Martens, Meryll Rogge, Julian Klausner are just a few of the names that today sit in the most influential houses in the world, and all carry with them an Antwerp education. The Festival also aims to capitalize on this heritage: to give a recognizable face to a city that is currently one of the main creative and economic drivers of Flanders (despite being affected by the international crisis just like other fashion capitals), and that since 2021 has been working on a multi-year plan focused on sustainability, local production, and digital innovation applied to fashion.

However, unlike the usual events held in major fashion capitals, this is not a fashion week in the conventional sense: no schedule of shows reserved for industry insiders, no market logic driving it as the main engine. The setup is more akin to a Design Week, where fashion becomes a pretext to traverse the entire city, from a museum to a shop, from a historic building to an industrial space by the port. The MoMu opens its doors to allow the general public to immerse themselves in the exhibition on the Antwerp Six; the KMSKA hosts until November the dialogue between the permanent collection and the young designers from the Academy; the Waagnatie has hosted the SHOW of the Royal Academy, with over 120 students from around the world on the runway. It is precisely this vocation for permeability between disciplines, generations, insiders, and the general public that distinguishes the Festival from the traditional fashion week circuit. The declared goal is not to intercept buyers and orders, but to build the identity of the city: to make Antwerp a recognizable creative laboratory, capable of telling its story to the world not only through its masters but also through those who are learning to become one.

Julian Klausner and the importance of a multidisciplinary education

The Fashion Talks represented the most reflective moment of the Antwerp.Fashion Festival. Zalando, the official partner of the Talks, transformed the Botanic Sanctuary Hotel on Leopoldstraat into an immersive space, presenting the latest innovations of the platform — adaptive fashion, virtual fitting rooms, and the virtual styling tool Style It — and gathering diverse voices from the industry: from Laura Toledano (General Manager Western Europe of Zalando) to Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh, to Julian Klausner, now creative director of Dries Van Noten.

In dialogue with Chioma Nnadi (Head of Editorial Content of British Vogue), Klausner, who spent years alongside Dries Van Noten before inheriting the creative direction, shared how his connection with the city developed gradually, first through the collections, then the store, and then the major exhibition Dries Van Noten: Inspirations in Paris in 2014. When he spoke of Antwerp as a creative system, the tone became more structural. Belgium, he explained, did not have a tradition of luxury fashion when the Six began, and that lack, paradoxically, was their fortune: no weight to bear, no canon to respect. A freedom that arises from emptiness and that the schools (mainly the Antwerp Academy and La Cambre in Brussels) have managed to transform into method. “We owe a lot to these schools,” he said, recalling a radically practical educational approach, where students learn to sew by hand from day one.

Not everything that glitters is gold, not even when there are sequins involved

The end-of-year show of the Royal Antwerp Academy, a four-hour spectacle in which students showcased the skills acquired over the year before an external jury including Michèle Lamy and Klausner himself, began with a disclaimer that reads: “Attention: the dream of fashion comes with an asterisk as big as a house.” This is perfectly expressed by the calm opening of the letter addressed to the Ministry of Education (“We are pissed”), signed by the students and the Fashion department of Antwerp: the ministry has approved a cut to funding for international students, resulting in an increase in tuition from €8,900 to €25,000 annually. An increase that students describe as “xenophobic, and that threatens Antwerp’s position as a city of international fashion.” And indeed, the key to the historic success of what, although distant from official fashion geographies, has become a fashion capital, has always been the avant-garde educational training, free of barriers or geographical or mental boundaries: it is precisely among the desks of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts that ambitions and friendships among the Six were born. An approach that the Antwerp.Fashion Festival has fully inherited: here experimentation is encouraged, as is solidarity among designers, artists, students, and the public. It is in this spirit that the exhibition KMSKA X Young Fashion Designersfits in, which tells the ability of new generations to inherit the artistic heritage evoked by Klausner during the Fashion Talks. Designers from around the world created their outfits inspired by the paintings of the KMSKA, showcasing their personal vision, technical skills, and artistic freedom.

An event that has demonstrated, in intent and practice, how that international role, earned with a certain degree of recklessness in the past, and of which we now see the results (with many of its students occupying the creative directions of the most influential houses in the world) is currently challenged by policies that do not seem to recognize multiculturalism as a value. A fact that stands out in a country that, far from the routes of traditional fashion, has nonetheless managed to systematize a cosmopolitan identity, transforming it into a successful cultural and economic project. Without many words, with the calm demeanor that is characteristic of her, Ann Demeulemeester reiterated this, sitting in the front row at the celebration show for the 40th anniversary of her friend Walter Van Beirendonck and present at the debut show of Marcel Sommer. Reminding everyone that every great creative season always begins the same way: with someone being given a chance.