The Antwerp Six Obsession Is Finally Getting Some Context
Three is the magic number, but six is how you get the party started, especially in Belgium. Enter the Antwerp Six, a moniker used to describe the work of designers Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene, and Marina Yee, who all graduated from Belgium’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the ’80s. Since then, the Six’s collective impact not only put Antwerp on the international fashion map, but its members also made the fashion establishment look like they’ve been dressing for the wrong party.
In modern day fashion parlance, citing “The Six” has become shorthand for the supposed origin of alt capital-F Fashion. Beneath its commercial surface lies an entire culture of weirdo-expensive clothing, from avant gardeners in galoshes and a belt as a top, to vampiric Liberace types in all black.
And while fashion people worth their salt have been taking notice at the blog level for years, The Six are now getting their dues from traditional media as well. Filmmaker Reiner Holzemer’s documentary The Six — the first official filmic documentation of the group — is slated for wider theatrical release this November after its world premiere in Belgium just last month. Holzemer’s take on the Antwerp Six is less of an ode, however, and more of a provocation: Were the designers really as unified a fashion movement as we think they were?
From what the film’s synopsis suggests, The Six is an examination into the real friendships between the designers and their varying individual fashion practices that, perhaps, have become mythologized beyond what they actually were — a group of fashion school students all flipping the bird at the same time.
Meanwhile, The fashion writer and creator of the award-winning podcast Articles of Interest Avery Trufelman has a forthcoming book called The Antwerp Six: How a Belgian Vanguard Made Modern Fashion arriving at the end of January 2027, containing new interviews from the designers all about their lives behind the clothes, and how both converged to create their outsized influence.
The film and the book’s timing offer the fashion industry (and its biggest fans) a major opportunity to better understand The Six both as individuals and as a group — and not just as an impressive reference point to drop into conversation. As the synopsis of Trufelman’s book suggests, there’s more to plumb within the Antwerp Six lore than what initially meets the eye (apparently, there were rivalries!).
Sure, name-checking The Antwerp Six proves you know fashion ball, but it’s high time for all casual and serious fashion people to brush up on their history and to better understand why the Belgian altar they worship at so deserves its flowers. It takes eyes to identify a Dries coat or “Ann D.” footwear,” and it takes brains to care about how these pieces came into existence.
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