Flanders

Flanders doesn’t have its own fashion week, and many renowned fashion journalists have never even been to Antwerp. And yet, the world knows all about Flanders’ designers.

These creative talents can pat themselves on the back for their incomparable reputation: their passion for quality, innovation and ingenuity is tough to ignore. But the fact that the global fashion industry knows their names – sometimes even before they’ve graduated from the Antwerp Academy – is in large part thanks to a relentless mission of Flanders itself.

It all started in 1986…

If you read our story on local shoe production a couple of weeks back, this might sound familiar. The Belgian textile industry, too, flourished until the 1970s, when cheap clothing imported from Asian countries started to threaten production in Western Europe. The Belgian government, led by then economy minister Willy Claes, decided to step in with a plan to not only support the textile industry economically, but also finally to lend it the image it deserved and would need to survive.

Part of the plan was the creation of the Institute for Textile and Confection in Belgium (ITCB), which launched a campaign that would go down in history as the official kick-start of Belgian fashion pride: Mode, dit is Belgisch (Fashion, this is Belgian).

Before this campaign, there was no such thing as “Belgian fashion”. Fashion was either French or Italian, or perhaps Japanese if it was especially avant-garde. But, at the same time, six extraordinary students graduated from the Antwerp Academy, equally convinced of their talent as of their rightful place on the world stage of fashion.

Driven by their ambition – and sponsored by the ITCB – they collectively participated in London Fashion Week in 1986. Here, they were hailed as the “Antwerp Six” – Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk van Saene, Dries Van Noten, Marina Yee and Walter Van Beirendonck – catching the eye of influential fashion professionals and forever etching the label “Belgian” in their minds.

Participating in these world-renowned fairs, let alone staging your own fashion show, is beyond the means of any young graduate; even navigating the fashion industry is impossible if you’re on your own. Where should you go first? Who should you meet? How do you get the right press? All of these daunting questions are still as relevant today for new generations of designers leaving our schools.

As young designers from a country that meant nothing in the fashion world, who knows how far the Antwerp Six – who are still riding that early 1980s wave – would have reached without the help of the ITCB? Its success proven, the Flemish government has never let fashion out of its sight again.

Antwerp Six: The next generation(s)

Roughly a decade after the initial campaign to launch the Belgian fashion industry, the Flanders Fashion Institute (FFI) was founded. As a successor to the ITCB, its main goal is to promote Flemish designers in Belgium and abroad. A variety of events are organised each year to expose designers and young labels to the rest of the world. Contests and awards are staged to financially support and encourage new talent.

Ghent and Antwerp alternate as the setting for the yearly Vitrine project, during which young labels and designers take over shop windows in the designated city to reveal new creative universes.

But perhaps the most important project the FFI ever developed is the “Showroom Antwerp” organised during Paris Fashion Week. Each season a different group of about six designers – a strategic number – is invited to showcase their latest collection in a showroom strategically situated in the middle of the fashion world’s capital.

Everything is taken care of: from the invitations to every important buyer to the PR with the fashion publications that matter. For many a designer, participating in this event has meant the official takeoff of their professional careers. The formula was practically begging for an encore in other fashion cities, which is why, last month, the FFI organised the first “Showroom Antwerp” in New York. Seven designers were welcomed at the offices of Flanders House in the New York Times building during the city’s Fashion Week.

Two hundred and fifty fashion professionals were invited to the opening of the showroom, including the famous American designer Diane von Fürstenberg, who was born in Brussels. “I had very high expectations of this ‘Showroom Antwerp’, and I’m glad to see them affirmed. The collections of these designers are of very high quality, and they absolutely deserve a chance on the American market,” said von Furstenberg during the opening ceremony.

Fashion wasn’t the only product Belgium presented in New York during Fashion Week. Flanders House also hosted an exhibition about diamonds in collaboration with the Antwerp World Diamond Centre and the “ARTS meets FASHION” project of Dutch photographer Flore Zoé. “In the future, we want to combine the promotion of diverse Belgian products more often to better show the creativity of the Flemish industry,” says FFI director Edith Vervliet.

Reinforcements: Flanders DC

As the showroom in New York demonstrates, collaborations often prove more productive than two concepts standing on their own. And as the support of young, creative talent in Flanders requires a mix of skills – both economic and creative – FFI decided to merge with Flanders District of Creativity earlier this year. The FFI will keep its name, which has become a well-defined brand. But it will profit from an intensive cooperation with Flanders DC, the organisation for entrepreneurial creativity.

Flanders’ mission doesn’t stop with the promotion of talent: the goal is to make the industry as thriving as possible. So even when they successfully get a new designer “out there”, if that designer doesn’t succeed in launching his or her own business, then the mission has failed.

“The merger of both organisations will allow us to make entrepreneurial Flanders more creative and to make creative Flanders more entrepreneurial”, explains Lorin Parys, chairman of the new organisation. This philosophy was symbolised by a highly unusual fashion show last January in Antwerp to celebrate the birth of the new organisation. CEOs of Flemish companies were dressed by Flemish designers to illustrate the beginning of a new, creative economy.

www.ffi.be
www.flandersdc.be

ART meets (Flanders) FASHION

The Flanders Fashion Institute (FFI) brought one extra person along to the Antwerp Showroom in New York last month – although she wasn’t a designer, and she wasn’t Flemish. But photographer Flore Zoé is somewhat of an honorary Antwerpenaar.

Zoé, 34, hails from the Netherlands, but “from a very young age, I’ve visited Antwerp as often as I could. It has resulted in me working with Belgian companies on various occasions.”

During her last exhibition at Hotel Banks in Antwerp, she met Edith Vervliet.” Zoé and the director of the FFI hit it off instantly and immediately wanted to collaborate artistically. Zoé’s photography hangs somewhere between art and fashion: a trait that can easily be connected to designers represented by the FFI.

The idea behind ART meets FASHION, a series of six photographs first exhibited in the Antwerp Showroom of New York’s Fashion Week and later in the showroom in Paris, is to portray the creative process of design: from inspiration to exhibition of the finished product.

Zoé interviewed 10 designers who all graduated from the Fashion Department of Antwerp’s Academy of Fine Arts between 2000 and 2008. For the photo shoot, she turned to the Museum for Industrial Archaeology and Textile (MIAT) in Ghent, which offered brilliant backdrops – from the rooftop view of the city to the antique industrial machinery inside.

“A journalist in the States who saw my work in New York said: ‘Flore Zoé is a storyteller, and her medium is the photograph.’ I think that is a beautiful way to put it,” says Zoé.

The series is not simply fashion photography, it is an imaginative mise-en-scène of the art and science of making clothes: “I was fascinated by the idea that throughout history and in every culture, there have always been fashion designers,” says Zoé. “It intrigued me in such a way that I started developing it as a concept.”

At last week’s Paris Fashion Week, the series was a reproduction; the originals never left New York. “There was such an interest from galleries and art buyers there, we decided to leave it,” says Zoé. Art meets Flanders Fashion will be on display at Flanders House in New York for about one more month before travelling to international galleries.

www.florezoe.com