Following the news of Marina Yee&rsquo;s passing, we look back at how the Antwerp Six rose from Antwerp&rsquo;s Royal Academy in the 1980s to become one of the most influential fashion collectives in history.

When we talk about the people who truly changed contemporary fashion, the conversation always circles back to one group: the Antwerp Six.
Their origin story has been told for decades: six graduates of Antwerp&rsquo;s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1986, cramming their collections into a rented van, driving to the British Designer Show in London, and within three days attracting the attention of Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman, and Liberty. But the real fire was lit earlier. In 1981, the Belgian government invested directly in fashion through the "Fashion: It&rsquo;s Belgian" campaign and the Golden Spindle competition. That same year, the entire graduating class left school, including the famous&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/10-rare-facts-about-martin-margiela" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Martin Margiela</a>, who chose to head to Paris to work for Gaultier. For the first time, Belgium had both the talent and the infrastructure that could actually make a difference.

Each member of the Antwerp Six carved their own lane within this unique opportunity:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/dries-van-noten-career-fashion-shows-history-brand-bio-designer" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dries Van Noten</a>, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs, and Marina Yee.&nbsp;
Dries Van Noten refined quiet maximalism long before it had a name, exploring print, color, and ornament.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/ann-demeulemeester-fall-winter-2023-runway-collection-ludovic-de-saint-sernin-looks-photos" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Ann Demeulemeester</a>&nbsp;transformed poetry into a uniform, dressing the world in black and white with a Gothic romanticism. Walter Van Beirendonck created a world of hyper-saturated color and visual activism that pushed fashion toward the future, rather than merely documenting the present. Dirk Van Saene distilled fashion into craft and proportion, always choosing depth over volume, and keeping his work intentionally elusive. Dirk Bikkembergs pushed the athletic body into luxury territory, foreshadowing the sports-luxury merger that now defines so much of menswear. And Marina Yee, often the quietest of them all, worked through reinvention: upcycling before the term even existed, treating old garments as fragments of memory, and making the finished piece more artifact than product.
What has kept the Six relevant is not a shared aesthetic; rather, what unified them was a belief that clothing could be a serious, intellectual medium. They brought experimentation and conceptual thinking into the commercial space. With the recent passing of Marina Yee on November 1, 2025, that legacy feels newly fragile.
In the end, the Antwerp Six not only shaped a new design language, but they rewired the expectations of the system itself. They showed that a few graduates from a small country could redraw global fashion with nothing more than conviction, intent, and a rented van.

Who Were the Antwerp Six? The Belgian Designers Who Changed Fashion Forever

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