In this FRONTPAGE story, we turn back the clock with fashion icon Walter Van Beirendonck.
Nobody tells you that the best designers don’t just make clothes — they build entire languages out of texture and ideas, overwhelming at first but impossible to ignore once you start to understand them. This is the best way to describe the work of designer Walter Van Beirendonck, whose punk theatrics have included fashion shows with line dancing cowboys, rhinestone catsuits and Puk Puk the alien, transforming him into his own stratosphere-orbiting satellite industry. He is part of the “Antwerp Six” — the famed group of designers that put Belgian fashion on the international map — yet his name might be overshadowed by those of, say, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten, two of his prominent peers. Nor has he roistered in money-printing commercial success like fellow Belgian designers Kris Van Assche or Raf Simons, both former creative directors of Dior.
Van Beirendonck may not hold a blue chip position at a luxury giant like LVMH or Kering, but his eye for the outlandishly surreal — complete with the prescient protest slogan “KISS THE FUTURE! FUCK THE PAST!” from his experimental sublabel W.&L.T. — has inspired names like Jeremy Scott, Virgil Abloh, Craig Green (a former intern), Glenn Martens (a former student), and Demna Gvasalia (a former student and employee). (Whether they’ll credit him is another discussion.) Even Raf Simons’ outsize success can be traced to Van Beirendonck, who steered his former intern away from furniture design and towards fashion.
“I’m very proud, in fact, that my community didn’t grow old with me,” the 67-year-old designer says defiantly from his Antwerp studio on a chilly December afternoon. He’s in high spirits, answering questions with circuitous stories that spiral into additional tangents, often speaking until he’s interrupted. “It has always been young people interested in my garments, and that’s still true today. That’s what keeps me going: despite everything happening, there’s still the drive to create something beautiful, to make something different, [and to offer something meaningful] to someone else. It’s that feeling I have now more than ever.”
Van Beirendonck emerged in the ‘80s as a technicolor, sadomasochistic alternative to the monochrome sobriety of the Japanese avant-garde: Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, and Rei Kawakubo (later a friend and collaborator). His inflatable Hulk muscle jackets, latex fetish masks, and African Bozo-inspired headgear have cut through the starched shirt fronts of the fashion-going public for over 40 years. His clothing, in all its playful anarchy, is a conduit for powerful messages about safe sex, authoritarianism, and capitalism in a fashion landscape myopically obsessed with designer musical chairs.
Today, Van Beirendonck wears his trademark knuckle dusters, only his middle fingers and thumbs free from the weight of his signet rings. The word “Otherworldly” is spelled out across the front of his black zip-up hoodie in thick red felt, the “w” double the size of the other letters. It’s enshrined under a giant rainbow with cartoon aliens in flying saucers orbiting around it. At one point during our interview, he reveals a new extraterrestrial print he’s working on for his upcoming collection, clumsily holding it up to the camera.
He’s the last storyteller of his ilk left. Martin Margiela quit fashion in 2009 to pursue art. Same for Demeulemeester, who now mostly designs homeware. Van Noten left his eponymous label in 2024 to focus on things he “never had time for.” As the only member of the Antwerp Six who is still actively designing under his own label, Van Beirendonck refuses to recycle or reheat his greatest hits, instead producing collections that continue to shock and inspire. Cratered bomber jackets with cuffs stitched at intervals like orifices, a woolly Big Foot knit, and baroque gimp masks being recent examples of work that left show attendees dumbstruck with rapture. (His Fall/Winter 24 audience “adored it, loudly,” according to critic Luke Leitch.) His tireless output is perhaps rivaled only by Miuccia Prada or Donatella Versace. He’s survived critical disgust and continues to plumb the depths of his demented dreams to give us a show, and instill in the next generation of designers what capital “D” design can accomplish. How does Walter Van Beirendonck get away with it all?
Go back to the beginning, and you’ll start to find answers. Like the rest of the Antwerp Six, Van Beirendonck attended the highly selective Royal Academy of Fine Arts. Fellow classmate “[Martin Margiela and I] had exactly the same tasks to do, and it was a kind of ritual,” Van Beirendonck explains of the Academy’s weekly assignments. The course didn’t tell students what to do, but simply insisted they “do it again,” according to alumnus Glenn Martens, now the head of Diesel. To start, students are restricted to designing exclusively using white cotton. Every week, they completed the same assignment: choose a historical painting or drawing to inspire a contemporary design.
In the 2019 documentary Martin Margiela: In His Own Words, Margiela recounts another assignment that tasked students with crafting a garment solely from materials one would find in a kitchen. (Margiela assembled a smock using kitchen towels.) “Instead of going to a fabric shop, we were pushed to repurpose things you could find around the house,” Van Beirendonck recalls, pausing for several moments to pinpoint what exactly he made for an assignment nearly 50 years ago. “I was using towels with checks and then combining them with plastic.” Crossbreeding traditional fabrics with high-performance tech materials might seem commonplace now, but this constrictive teaching method pushed the young student to explore unconventional textiles in his designs — a practice he continues to this day, as seen in SS24’s AI-inspired alien alphabet prints and padded crash test dummy suits.
In 1980, when the Six graduated from the Royal Academy, Antwerp was more famous for its diamond district than its designers. “In those first five to seven years, I had the chance to create something that made a real impact,” he remembers of his beginnings, when all eyes were trained on Belgium’s “Twerps” and his clothing was attracting new international buyers each year, fascinated by embroidered baby’s harnesses resized to fit a man’s chest and his King Kong sweaters. “It was the early days of what we now call streetwear, which didn’t really exist back then. I was combining elements from bikewear, safety gear, and more elegant tailoring — a mix that was quite exceptional for the era. The result was a colorful product aimed at young people.”
After failing to land a paid internship in Paris, Van Beirendonck went back to Antwerp to start his eponymous label. To help fund it, he landed a position at Bartsons — Belgium’s answer to Burberry — where he refined his tailoring expertise. In 1985, he reluctantly returned to his alma mater to teach, a conceit that initially nipped at his insecurities. “I had, in fact, three jobs and a teaching job also,” he says, referring to a sportswear line called Rhinosaurus Rex he created for Gianfranco Ferré. “I did it for three, four seasons… Ferré was very nice to work for. He was showing me things I didn’t know at that time. He started to introduce me to sportswear, streetwear, baggy pants, and things like that, which were very new.”
At his own label, Van Beirendonck applied his skill at fusing tech fabrics and tailoring to transfigure the outsized concepts in his mind into knitwear and latex. Alongside his Academy graduating class, he bussed his wares to the British Designer Show in London in 1986, which he and his classmates felt was more open to newcomers compared to fashion capitals Paris and Milan. After the designers showcased their collections and scored a collective order from Barney’s, the press famously anointed them the Antwerp Six.
Van Beirendonck, who described his collection at the time to WWD as “a cross between The Flintstones and a Jules Verne novel, with elements of African body painting,” naturally stood out. In the years following his first show in London, Van Beirendonck gained steady recognition through provocative designs that blended whimsy and subversive themes. Leveraging the buzz he had generated from the Antwerp Six’s emergence and his daring early collections, he built a cult following, particularly among younger audiences intrigued by his bold aesthetic. This growing notoriety set the stage for the launch of his sublabel.
In early 1993, Van Beirendonck’s W.&L.T. (Wild and Lethal Trash, or simply pronounced, ‘Walt’) was born and quickly ballooned in popularity like one of his Leigh Bowery-esque latex bodysuits, taking over his pricey knitwear line. Its lower price point and graphic statement pieces were catnip to the MTV crowd (in Europe, at least). His fashion shows were a spectacle, ushering in a sci-fi futurism that was heretofore unseen on any other runway.
As Vivienne Westwood was titillating audiences with her “Tits” T-shirt and Jean Paul Gaultier was stirring controversy with his cone bras, Van Beirendonck took a more puckish approach to sex. Take his Spring/Summer 1996 show, “Killer/Astral Travel/4D-Hi-D.” He sent forty bears from London’s gay community down the catwalk hand-in-hand with children wearing the same outfits in miniature, sparking outrage from critics who accused it of condoning pedophilia. Or Fall/Winter 96’s “Paradise Pleasure Productions,” where models were wrapped entirely in latex to promote safe sex. All of it was bought and paid for by a German backer, jeans company Mustang, who bankrolled W.&L.T. and left Van Beirendonck with total creative control.
For a while, Mustang and Van Beirendonck thrived. At its height, W.&L.T. was sold at more than 500 retail locations and had expanded to Japan, where his brand of freak was most heartily embraced. “The years that I enjoyed so much were the years that I was working a lot in Japan,” he says. He was working with architect Marc Newson to create immersive retail experiences like Walter, a multi-brand shop housed in an Antwerp garage where customers were greeted by an eight-foot-tall wooden cat in the reception area and Mazzy Star blasting over the speakers. It’s hard to understate the influence of W.&L.T., which to this day has inspired a surge of Gen Zers eager to recreate the neo-glam rock youthquake that gave birth to these garments. “The interest in my work from the '90s is huge,” he says, a proud grin stretching across his face. “These 16, 17, 18-year-olds, they’re collecting it, trying to find it. It’s very nice to feel that connection.”
By 1997, having shown six W.&L.T. collections, Mustang grew skeptical of the commercial potential of his S&M experimentalism and pumped the brakes on his creative liberty. “They started trying to get out as much money as possible. When I said red, they said gray. When I said green, they said black,” he recalls of the tension that arose between him and his financial overlords. His contractual obligations with Mustang didn’t end until 2003. To prevent the group from releasing its own designs under Van Beirendonck’s name, he took them to court, embarking on a legal battle that lasted years and left him virtually bankrupt.
When the subject of freedom comes up, Van Beirendonck is plain-spoken. “At the time, it was an extreme decision [to take] because I was transitioning from unlimited budgets to a complete stop. I had a fantastic team in Antwerp, which I was responsible for, so there was a lot to consider [before ending the agreement],” he says. “Looking back now, it was the best decision I could have made. It allowed me to scale down, rethink everything, restart, and build something I had complete control over.”
It has always been young people interested in my garments, and that’s still true today. That’s what keeps me going.
Van Beirendonck was struggling financially, but his work was the most visible it had ever been. Each night of U2’s PopMart Tour, a two-year outing, Bono walked on stage wearing a W.&L.T. shirt printed with superhero muscles that now fetches eye-watering prices on the secondary market.
“I wasn’t a U2 fan at the time — I was into other bands, mostly electronic music,” he says. But after flying to Dublin, where Bono showed Van Beirendonck the PopMart set, he saw the vision and agreed to design the band’s tour costumes. “I understood then — they wanted to break out of the rock-and-roll cliché and reinvent themselves. Bono was very convincing, and within weeks, I had sketches ready.”
The legal woes that followed his split with Mustang dragged on for years, finally resolving in the early 2000s. Van Beirendonck retained the rights to his name but faced significant financial and creative roadblocks during the dispute. Unable to release collections under his own name due to contractual restrictions, he turned to collaborations and teaching to stay afloat. Orphaned from his benefactor, he had to work hard to build up his brand anew. “I left behind all my identity at W.&.L.T.,” he says. “I stepped out of that contract. I couldn’t take anything with me. So I had to start from scratch.”
The early 2000s were a period of relative quiet for Van Beirendonck, who was struggling to recapture the magic and attention of his previous collections, now doing it all anonymously under a short-lived label called aestheticterrorists. “The first collections were to attract press attention or show I was still there — that was it,” he says. “They weren’t working well or selling well.” Wary of controversy in the wake of 9/11, he retired the name aestheticterrorists after only four collections. At this stage, however, he was legally able to use his own name once again, so he continued designs under Walter Van Beirendonck.
He briefly stepped away from fashion to curate a series of exhibitions for Flanders Fashion Institute and Antwerpen Open. One highlight, “2women,” explored the duality of rebel design talents Coco Chanel and Rei Kawakubo. Van Beirendonck personally flew to Japan to ask Kawakubo to be part of it.
“It was a very tense moment. We were sitting at the table together with Adrian [Joffe], her husband, and I explained the whole thing. I was very excited, but also a little bit afraid that she would say no. She was thinking very quietly, not really reacting. And then she said, ‘No… We are not going to do a static exhibition. We’re going to do five shows.’” Van Beirendonck accepted the challenge, organizing a series of fashion shows that pushed the boundaries of traditional runway presentations. These were not just displays of clothing but immersive experiences, combining theatrical elements, bold visuals, and music to create a narrative that reflected his avant-garde vision.
In 2007, Van Beirendonck returned to his alma mater, taking over as head of the Royal Academy. During his tenure, prodigies like Veronique Braquinho, A.F. Vandervorst, Olivier Rizzo, and Bernhard Willhelm emerged under his guidance, solidifying Belgium as a hotbed of new design talent.
Then there was Raf Simons. The Prada designer interned with Van Beirendonck in the early ‘90s, fresh out of LUCA School of the Arts with a degree in industrial design and furniture design. Simons recalled making an impression on Van Beirendonck in a 2005 New York Times interview: “Walter was glued to the drawings of my egg cups and thought they were great — I could start right away.”
It was a defining moment in Simons’ career — without Van Bierendonck’s prodding, he may never have become a fashion designer at all. “[Raf] started the internship focusing on what we were making for the showroom — small installations for showrooms in Paris, pieces for fairs, and some small furniture,” Van Beirendonck says. “He excelled at that work, but during that time, and even after staying on a bit longer, his fascination with fashion grew. There was a question of whether he should study further or go straight into fashion. Ultimately, he decided to start his own collection shortly after the internship.”
Sometimes I see things happening that I did before [...] I wonder, do journalists and the people watching have such a short memory?
Even as Van Beirendonck mentored burgeoning talent like Simons, he remained deeply committed to integrating subcultural aesthetics, bold graphics, and playful irreverence into fashion before these elements became synonymous with the genre. From his early W.&L.T. collections, he incorporated oversized silhouettes, graphic prints, and playful slogans like “Future Proof” that blurred the lines between the runway and the subway. And it was all available at a wallet-friendly price point, from $25 for a T-shirt to $74 for a neoprene jacket.
While streetwear didn’t originate with Van Beirendonck, his designs suggest a kinship with a long line of rag trade rebels: a fusion of accessibility, attitude, and artistic expression. His collaborations with conceptual artists like Erwin Wurm and his fearless incorporation of pop culture references helped shape a visual language that inspired designers like Virgil Abloh and Demna Gvasalia. Even now, he has “a good relationship” with Gvasalia, he says. “Sometimes I'm critical, but he knows that also.”
Not until 2015 did it feel like streetwear officially began to ingest luxury fashion. Hype began building around Abloh, Matthew M. Williams at 1017 ALYX 9SM, and Gvasalia, who was selling VETEMENTS DHL logo tees for three figures. The accordion of fashion history had wheezed, the intricacies of groundbreaking creativity and its associated collections condensed to whatever one can unearth in a trivial Google search. Here was a younger generation of designers, unaware that what they were attempting on the catwalk had been done before (and, some might say, better). In 2021, Van Beirendonck called out Abloh for lifting a design for Louis Vuitton’s SS21 collection from Van Beirendonck’s FW16 collection, which featured plush mascots sewn onto suits. The parallels were obvious. Shortly after Abloh’s work hit the runway, Van Beirendonck posted an image from his own FW20 show featuring a garment emblazoned with “I HATE FASHION COPYCATS” to his Instagram.
“Sometimes I see things happening that I did before,” Van Beirendonck says. “I did the prosthetic makeup back in the ‘90s [with Geoff Portass for the ‘Believe’ collection]. I did fetish very intensively with the masks and the latex. And [these are things] recently repeated by other brands. I wonder, do journalists and the people watching have such a short memory? Because it was there. It is documented, you can see it.”
The backlash from Abloh’s supporters was swift. Kanye West weighed in on the controversy, tweeting, “Virgil can do whatever he wants.” Suddenly, the accusation shifted from a discussion about design originality to issues of race and cultural appropriation of Eastern and African cultures in Van Beirendonck’s previous collections, with detractors turning him into the poster boy for Belgian colonialism. In the wake of the allegations, Abloh released an 83-page pamphlet together with the notes of his next fashion show, which included a series of questions like, “What are the residual effects of colonialism?” or “Who owns my ancestry?” and “What is a coincidence?”
This heated exchange highlighted the complexities of cultural borrowing in fashion — an ongoing tension between inspiration and appropriation that has long defined the work of designers like Van Beirendonck. Throughout the mid-2000s, Van Beirendonck reimagined the role of a globalist designer, weaving cultural influences into audacious mashups and eclectic combinations that delighted in provocation. A papier-mâché penis hat inspired by the Bozo people in Mali by Stephen Jones for SS08’s “Sexclown”; a neon Mongolian-inspired tunic; a futuristic Maasai beadwork bodysuit; voodoo priest masks for FW12’s “Lust Never Sleeps.” His magpie approach to integrating diverse cultural motifs became a signature.
Starting each collection with images compiled in a scrapbook, the designer has never been shy to lay bare the origins of his inspirations. In fact, he put these scrapbooks and artefacts (a coffin from Ghana in the shape of a Mercedes-Benz, images of David Bowie, Star Wars figures, Keith Haring's AIDS awareness poster) on display for a retrospective exhibition in 2011, “Dream the World Awake.” “I’m a big fan of cultures from all over, from Eastern Europe to Papua New Guinea,” he says. “I have thousands of books because it’s precious to me, looking at beauty and nice things. The way I work with inspiration, I never use it literally or misuse it. I translate it into contemporary ideas, which are much more my own way of thinking and showing things.”
For someone so accustomed to being outspoken, he questions why it’s no longer straightforward to draw from any reference. The shift in what can be used or reinterpreted outside of one’s own culture, while fostering greater sensitivity and accountability, has also complicated the process of artistic expression, leaving creators to navigate a delicate balance between honoring influences and avoiding missteps in an ever-evolving conversation about ownership, respect, and cultural boundaries. “Everything slightly not ‘okay’ is discussed [online] and cannot be done [creatively],” he argues. “I think it’s a danger, how the world is progressing. We should respect cultures, but there should also be the possibility to be inspired, creative, to look at beautiful things and enjoy them. It’s a pity we’re losing that freedom.”
Whatever creative or critical vice-like squeezing Van Beirendonck has endured from peers and the public, he feels more hopeful than ever. It’s his refusal to buff the edges or dilute his vision that allows him to remain a disruptive force, challenging norms with the same curiosity he had as a student. When authenticity and individuality are more celebrated than ever, his raw, unapologetic approach feels not only relevant but essential. Question your references, he urges. Dare to shock. Build your community. Though he was forced to retire from his position at the Royal Academy because of a “stupid” law that mandates teachers stop working at 65, he continues to tutor at Florence’s Polimoda, forming the bedrock for a new generation of young designers to carry the torch of his uncompromising ethos, enabling them to kiss a new future. As society throttles headlong into a new period of socio-political unrest, Van Beirendonck plans to respond how he always has: by creating. Yet after making statements for the majority of his career, he’s allowing himself to pare back, focusing more on fit, graphics, and construction.
“I’m a little fed up with political statements,” he says, adding that we’re living in an “overwhelming” moment bloated with ominous headlines. “It’s difficult one way or another. Despite that, I’m trying to keep on believing in a bright future. I still believe in fashion as a communicator. It still has that kind of power.”
