Belgium’s ‘Unexpected Fashion Story’ on Display in Brussels

BRUSSELS, Belgium — "Small but mighty" is perhaps the best way to describe Belgium's role in the global fashion industry. Despite its modest size and the absence of a fashion week, since the 'Antwerp Six' designers put Belgium on the fashion map in the 1980s, the nation has yielded designers with influence that far outsizes their country's geography.

Last week, the Belgian capital of Brussels celebrated its unique position in the fashion world with a conference and other events centred around the launch of The Belgians: An Unexpected Fashion Story, a new fashion exhibition at Bozar, the city's centre for fine arts, showcasing the work of designers like Martin Margiela, Dries Van Noten and Anthony Vaccarello.

The events concluded with La Cambre’s graduate fashion show. Along with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Brussels-based La Cambre is the springboard for Belgium’s particular breed of intellectual, artistically off-the-wall fashion education.

“The fashion department [students] are really in art school,” explained Didier Vervaeren. “You study for five years. In the first three years, it is forbidden to talk of business and marketing.”

According to Diane Von Furstenburg, who is Belgian by birth, this system yields results. “What I like about the Belgian schools is that there is so much room for originality and courage and craziness,” she said.

That originality, courage and craziness was certainly on show this year in a three-hour spectacle that at points resembled performance art more than a catwalk show. As the models paraded, danced and skateboarded clothes down the runway, strains of quintessentially 'Belgian' design ran throughout, visible in the layers of bright colours, materials and design techniques thrown together in every single look — the colours reminiscent of Walter Van Beirendonck; the amalgam of textures with more than a whisper of Martin Margiela's 'Artisanal' approach.

Marine Serre showed an impressively precise collection of womenswear silhouettes — from culottes to peplum bustiers and floor-sweeping coats — all wrapped into a cohesive collection through the designer's use of meticulously executed layers of feminine pleats.

Also of note was Naomi Courau, whose camo outerwear and streetwear-styled designs, including a crinkled floral collared blouse, stood out for their wearability, in a sea of theatrical — at times, fantastical — imaginative fashion design.

See a selection of looks from the La Cambre show below.