Dirk van saene biography of williams
Approximately a third of the screen is taken up by a white beard. Against the background wall, shelves heave with toys, models, dolls, and plastic figurines (including a Spiderman figure which teeters, imposingly, from above). At the center of it all is the 63-year-old fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck.
Van Beirendonck is speaking via Zoom from Zandhoven, a small village in rural Belgium, where he lives with his partner, the designer Dirk Van Saene. Though he still regularly makes the 11-mile commute into Antwerp, where he is the director of the fashion school at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Van Beirendonck has, like most of us, seen his life shrink dramatically this summer. “I miss the world,” he says. “I miss seeing exhibitions. I miss being in another city — not that I was traveling that much, just for work. And I miss coming together with other people.”
Despite a career spanning almost 40 years, Van Beirendonck remains something of an outlier within fashion. He doesn’t share the pop-cultural omnipresence of Karl Lagerfeld or Donatella Versace, nor the carefully-cultivated mystique of Rei Kawakubo or Yohji Yamamoto. Instead, both he and his work have maintained an “if you know, you know” quality for almost four decades. His idiosyncratic, often cartoonish collections (and the frequently challenging to wear pieces within them) represent an increasingly rare proposition in today’s fashion market: the result of total creative freedom, completely unfettered by corporate or commercial concerns.
Walter Van Beirendonck Fall/Winter 2020.Ronald Stoops
Van Beirendonck, unlike almost every other significant working designer today, remains completely independent, with total control over his brand. “I’m 100-percent free to do whatever I want,” he says. “And I’m supported by my clients, and by my fans. It’s a big community.” And it has allowed him to occupy a boundary-pushing, controversy-courting position throughout his career. Yet for all the bombast GALLERY GUY: A member of the famous Antwerp Six has taken up art-making: Dirk Van Saene has a show of new paintings and ceramic sculptures at the Gallery Sofie Van de Velde in the Flemish city, famed for its concentration of fashion designers. The works are said to portray “different characters that embody a certain emotion, with a focus on tragic or dramatically charged feelings,” he said. “As an artist, my work has no functionality: it shows the human body, not in a direct context, but rather as the notions of a human figure. At the same time, the emotions they depict are equally as important,” Van Saene said. “My sculptures are neither mannequins, nor statues. They are characters, dressed by me.” Van Saene’s show, titled “Hope and Despair,” runs through Feb. 21. Another Belgian designer often wrongly counted as a member of the Antwerp Six, Martin Margiela, will make his debut as an artist with an exhibition opening in April at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, the art foundation backed by Groupe Galeries Lafayette, scheduled to open in April. It is to showcase feature previously unseen sculptures, photographs and installations. The Antwerp Six includes Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Marina Yee, Walter Van Beirendonck and Dirk Bikkembergs — all alumni of the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. They were considered fashion’s next radical wave in the late ’80s. Demeulemeester hung up her scissors in 2013 and in 2019 turned her hand to ceramic dishes and other housewares under the Serax label. See also: Who Are The Antwerp Six Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene Set Multi-brand Boutique This is a list of notable people from Antwerp, who were either born in Antwerp, or spent part of their life there. This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources. Text by Photography by Posted The collaborators discuss their hiatus from the fashion industry, women designing menswear, and breaking with the need for perfection. Antwerp is a dark place. The Flemish are a strange people. Yet few Belgian designers are inclined to celebrate that fact. Although their strength lies in storytelling, they rarely tell tales of home—more often preoccupied with exotic locales and dream-like escapism than the grey streets along the Scheldt. Their collective grouping is shrugged off for the most part; each of the “Antwerp Six” and beyond dismisses that moniker with the luxury of hindsight—and their varying degrees of success are attributed to business acumen, to circumstances, and l’air du temps. Of the second wave of talent to emerge from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Veronique Branquinho stands as a lone female voice, her enchanting vision of femininity cocooned in a dark mysticism. Neither wholly conformist nor steeped in the avant-garde, Branquinho’s designs are imbued with an unrelenting romance, their roots in both sartorial and bohemian culture combining to typify Antwerp’s rebellious sensuality. If the designs of her one-time partner Raf Simons represent the punk discord of male youth, then Branquinho’s work mirrors a softer, almost Sapphic allure—celebrating the sacred feminine and the multiplicities of womanhood young and old. Returning to fashion in 2012 after a short hiatus, her label has gathered new potency, its relevance unquestioned amongst the resurgence of a 90s grunge aesthetic and spurred along by two newfound partnerships: the first in collaboration with London-based stylist Panos Yiapanis behind the scenes of her Paris shows and the second in the atelier, with her mentor, fellow designer, and member of the “Six,” Dirk Van Saene, who joins in on the conversation below. Dan Thawley—How long did you stop the brand for?Dirk Van Saene Has Turned His Hand to Painting, Sculpture
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