Yusuke Hotchi 'Borderless' (Master) Photo by Magdalena Piotrowski
The Belgian city of Antwerp became a Mecca of the fashion avant-garde once again last weekend. It’s the same scene every year: droves of headhunters, talent scouts, fashion journalists, photographers and bloggers flock into the concrete hangar on the banks of the Schelde River on the search for the design icons of tomorrow.
Every year over one hundred fashion design students from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts show their graduate presentations here. The four-hour shows take place over three evenings of one weekend. And the hype surrounding it comes as no surprise: after all, alongside London’s Central St. Martins the academy is regarded as one of the world’s best fashion schools, and as well as the legendary Antwerp Six in the eighties – which Walter van Beirendonck the Head of the Fashion Department, and design master Dirk Van Saene were a part of – it has also spawned new generations of designers like Veronique Branquinho, A.F. Vandevorst, Stefan Schneider, Bernhard Willhelm, Christian Wijnants, Bruno Pieters, Tim van Steenbergen, Peter Pilotto, Haider Ackermann and Kriss van Assche.
Walter van Beirendonck attaches great importance to individual support right from the very beginning of the degree course, but demands a lot of effort in return. If you want to make it at this talent forge, you have to be prepared to work hard: of the 47 students that start off the first Bachelor year, less than half remain by the third year. Many are immediately employed by headhunters, which is certainly an unequivocal sign of the academy’s high levels.
Only very few graduates decide to follow on with the Master degree. In the editorial of the accompanying publication ‘Show/Off #4-Magazine’, Walter van Beirendonck expresses his regret as this: “A master’s degree, after all, is more than a diploma: it is proof that after four years of searching, a student has found his own vision and is ready for great adventures.”
One thing’s for sure: all of the shows demonstrated extremely high levels of vision and the promise of great adventures.
