When it comes to fashion school pedigrees, few institutions can rival Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Founded in 1663, it’s one of the world’s oldest art schools and among its most formidable creative incubators. The Academy’s alumni roster reads like a fashion and art hall of fame. The legendary Antwerp Six rewrote the rules of contemporary fashion; Martin Margiela, who graduated a year ahead of them, went on to dismantle them altogether. Add to the roll call designers Kris Van Assche, Patrick Van Ommeslaeghe, Jan-Jan Van Essche, An Vandevorst, and Haider Ackermann, makeup visionary Peter Philips, and the celebrated artist Luc Tuymans, and the Academy’s influence begins to feel almost disproportionate to its size.
In Antwerp, greatness isn’t a curriculum requirement, yet somehow, generation after generation, it keeps showing up for class. This year’s Master’s graduates proved the rule still holds. And that is no small feat at a time when shrinking resources threaten institutions, and a wider atmosphere of uncertainty can easily cloud personal expression and hopes for the future. Yet if adversity has a natural enemy, it may well be Antwerp’s elegant resilience.
That spirit was on full display over the past weekend as the city came alive for the Antwerp Fashion Festival, four days of celebrations orbiting the Antwerp Six exhibition at the MoMu Museum. Highlights included a tribute to the remarkable 40-year career of Walter Van Beirendonck, both as a designer and as one of the Academy’s most influential teachers, alongside debut shows, a rich programme of talks (Dries Van Noten’s creative director Julian Klausner being a hit), and activations spread across the city.
The festivities peaked with the marathon showcase of this year’s Royal Academy Bachelor and Master’s students collections. Serving on this year’s jury, I was offered a front-row seat to 16 creative worlds and the diverse inspirations behind them. Around the table, opinions were as strong as the collections. Designers Olivier Theyskens, Francesco Risso, and Saul Nash joined artists Luc Tuymans and Carla Arocha, alongside the Academy’s teachers and creative director Brandon Wen, in passionate deliberations.
Theyskens praised the commitment to individuality as one of the Academy’s defining strengths. “I believe the institution holds a rare position in contemporary fashion education, having resisted the pressures and shifting priorities of the industry while maintaining a rigorous focus on research, discipline, and creative integrity,” he said. “The Academy has never been swayed by the evolution of the fashion world.” Students are expected not only to master technique but also to cultivate a genuine artistic point of view. “Across the collections, individuality prevailed over trend-chasing,” observed Theyskens, “with students presenting bodies of work shaped by introspection, research, and a striking confidence in their own voices.”
Risso found reassurance in the Academy’s unwavering sense of purpose. Having worked closely with the Master’s students over the past year, he praised not only the quality of the final collections but the coherence of the educational journey itself, from the first-year classrooms to the graduation runway. “What impressed me most was the commitment and humility of the teachers and the school,” he said, arguing that an institution of such value deserves far greater public support.
For Risso, the Academy’s strength lies in its resistance to immediacy. The collections that lingered in his mind were those “rooted in deep, almost obsessive research,” projects that maintained a clear vision from inception to execution. “In a moment defined by distraction and acceleration, that capacity for sustained focus is particularly significant,” he noted. And the strongest collections transformed that intensity “into something surprisingly light, generous and deeply human.”
For his collection, Bartosz Borowski found a fashion muse in the unruly universe of Lucian Freud. After immersing himself in the painter’s oeuvre, he singled out 12 works for a sort of forensic examination. Silhouettes drew from Freud’s famously chaotic studio and his unflinching treatment of the human body. Borowski was captivated by the tension between disorder and refinement in the artist’s work: the sumptuous folds of fabric enveloping his subjects, set against the backdrop of a cultivated lifestyle, provided Borowski with his aesthetic subtext.
Yvonne Schichtel’s creations unfolded like a meditation on fragility as resilience. Their conceptual roots lay in the writings of archeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose theories of ancient matrilineal societies offered the designer an alternative to “the aggression that defines much of contemporary life.” Schichtel proposed a return to the earth, the body, and forms of knowledge that have long been marginalized. Equally influential was the idea of beauty transformed by time, and the notion that love leaves traces: fading and imperfections were recast as a form of grace. These themes materialized in garments of extraordinary delicacy. Ancient goddess symbols discovered by Gimbutas were translated into cascading folds, translucent layers of tulle and silhouettes that seemed to hover around the body like clouds. The color palette was exquisite: a wash of powdery blush, faded rose, and muted earth tones was applied with the sensitivity of a watercolor painting.
A residency in Palermo proved fertile ground for Vincent Körber’s imagination. He was captivated by the way Norman, Arab, Venetian, and contemporary histories coexist, layered in plain sight. In Palermo, grandeur and decay are less opposites than roommates. Körber translated this condition into a sharp, contemporary wardrobe. Drawing on early 20th century Southern Italian tailoring traditions, as well as the dramatic photography of Letizia Battaglia, Marcella Campagnano, and Franco Zecchin, he found a compelling balance between bourgeois refinement and urban wear. Sophisticated construction was tempered by an ease and practicality that felt modern. For Körber, history can be worn lightly, without losing any of its weight.
Carla Lázaro Bonet’s project was rooted in the lineage connecting the women of her family and a rejection of patriarchal expectations. Flowers emerged as a central metaphor for women: growing in unexpected places, embodying resilience, claiming territory, and flourishing despite restriction. The visually compelling collection was developed through hands-on experimentation with new materials, fabric appliqués, original prints, and interesting surface techniques. Silhouettes unfolded through monumental volumes, exuberant and unapologetically expansive. Their generous proportions took on space with confidence and delight, transforming presence into a statement of self-expression.
A photograph of Cecil Beaton in a leopard-print bathrobe sparked Lars Martens’s creative fire. Elegant yet faintly absurd, the image captured Beaton’s gift for turning self-presentation into an art form. Beaton’s approach to dressing as performance, pleasure, and self-invention resonated with Martens. Wit and extravagance informed both his textile development and ornamental richness. Conceived as an antidote to prevailing moods of gloom and practicality, the range celebrated dressing up for its own sake. Decorative and unapologetically optimistic, it invited the wearer into a world where glamour is approached with both seriousness and irony.
Stan Peeters’s collection explored silhouettes as architectural compositions, drawing inspiration from modernist artists Marthe Donas and Alexander Archipenko, whose Cubist sculptures, defined by their interplay of voids, volumes, and open and closed shapes, became a key reference. This dialogue between space and form was translated into sculptural volumes, cut-outs, and structural constructions. Polished wooden accessories, developed in collaboration with his father, further extended and transformed the body, lending a decorative dimension.
A now-demolished dance hall in Guangzhou, once a hotspot for his parents’ generation’s idea of a good night out, set the tone for Feng Zhangchong’s presentation. He riffed on the golden age of Cantonese pop culture, the environment he grew up in, and the subcultures orbiting it today. A further influence on his menswear was the distinctly Cantonese sense of humor, especially the slang, which often feels designed to make outsiders feel slightly confused and insiders more than a little bit smug. That spirit runs through his creations: sharply tailored garments with a deliberate dash of mischief.
Inspired by the stark contrasts of German Expressionist cinema, the Manichean symbolism of films like Nosferatu, and unsettling artworks like Fuseli’s The Nightmare, Jeron Grünewald constructed his own narrative of unease. Echoing the structure of a classic horror film, or the logic of a waking nightmare, the offering started in white, only to be gradually overtaken by an encroaching pitch black. Tension emerged through shape and proportion; strings and hooks punctuated the garments, suggesting both constriction and release, as if the body were caught between control and collapse in a state of suspended discomfort.
Trained as a dancer, Tristan Stieners approached his presentation as if it were choreography, unbound by rules and composed from intuition rather than instruction. Reflecting on the passage of time and its influence on the perception of beauty, he balanced a sense of classicism with the fragility of the ephemeral and the slow erosion of decay. Voluminous yet weightless, his work was guided by free association, instinct, and flow: garments were conceived less as fixed objects than as traces of movement, as if echoing a dance just performed.
Men’s profound desire for closeness and connection was the driving inspiration behind Conor Turley’s narrative. Contemporary men often exist within self-imposed straightjackets, suppressing vulnerability while competing for perceived “alpha” status. Yet in history, flamboyance wasn’t a sign of weakness but a powerful expression of wealth and social standing. Questioning contemporary performances of hypermasculinity, Turley drew upon historical dress and costume traditions, reimagining them through a humorous lens. Rich in color and character, his designs challenged performative norms of masculinity while celebrating self-expression, intimacy, and theatricality.
Heavy metal music, particularly black and doom metal, served as a starting point for Mateus Wyczesany. Deliberate clashes of shapes and materials paired a restrictive leather jacket with the fluidity of silk. The front of a silhouette was sealed shut, creating a sense of claustrophobia, while the back opened up, exposing skin and offering release. Dark, forceful, and unapologetic in attitude,Wyczesany’s collection stood in compelling contrast to more lyrical and decorative expressions, underscoring the plurality of voices that emerged as one of the Academy’s strengths.
Called Unlearning Her, Suwen Liang’s lineup drew not from external references but from lived experience. Sparked by a painful heartbreak, it explored how women are shaped by domesticity and expectation, and what happens when those structures begin to unravel. Through silhouettes charged with strain and movement, the garments traced a journey from confusion to self-discovery. Domestic fixtures became unlikely protagonists: a bathroom curtain was transformed into dressmaking material, while swirls of dust beneath a vacuum cleaner found new life as fabric. A white shirt was constructed from colliding chemises, as though torn apart in a moment of fury. If heartbreak was the catalyst, self-determination was (perhaps) the final outcome.
Anna Lackner envisioned a diva on the verge of a breakdown, exhausted by the relentless pressure to appear flawless. Drawing on the spectacle of female pop stardom of the 2010s and the corrosive effects of fame and media scrutiny, the collection followed a public figure who has reached her limit. Lackner translated this fragile state into extravagant concoctions of feathers, sequins, and chiffon, looks that appeared moments away from falling apart—though hopefully not in front of the paparazzi.
Inspired by graffiti culture, Enak Baeken sought to capture its attitude of defiance, with a series of bold street-style uniforms animated by appliqué, intarsia, and live spray-painted interventions performed onstage during the show. Like graffiti itself, the collection refused to sit still, behave itself, or ask for approval.
A subtle spirit of rebellion permeated Yichun Liu’s showing. Straying from what society and family expect of a girl—obedience, stability, and a neatly mapped-out future—means venturing into the ambiguous, the fluid, and the unknown. Layered silhouettes and liquid forms suggest that wandering off course just may be the only course for her.
Inspired by the cinematic language of Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme, Byron Wang reflected on the paradox of intimacy: two people drawn toward one another, yet never quite becoming one. His garments simultaneously embraced and detached, hovering somewhere between connection and distance. Particular attention was given to the surfaces; developed as moving images in textile form, colorful jacquards drew on the work of the painter Cecily Brown, with motifs that never fully revealed themselves but appeared and dissolved at the edge of perception.
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