The Tamesis
À London
At some point, the gold ingot is completed. We want to continue, we really want to be authentic and not make clothes for a competition but to put clothes on the market and show them to the world. We were both very naive, yet very ambitious. So everyone is trying to make a series, Geert Bruloot [who co-owned a shoe shop in Antwerp at the time, acted as “troupe leader” to the Six, and is a co-curator of the MoMu] Said: “Let’s rent a caravan together and then we can go to London.” Everyone else had already decided to go, but I was pregnant and didn’t have a collection yet. The only thing I had prepared was sunglasses. So they went to London and took my sunglasses. [It was] In ’86 they went to London but I wasn’t there, I was having my son.
The third time I had my collection ready. I was hesitant at first because my goal was to make a series and go to Paris, but then I thought, “Well, maybe it would be nice to go to London,” because London seemed better to me because if you make a mistake, it’s probably not a big deal in London.
I spent every penny I had to make a little collection and we went to London and set up this little stall at the British Designers Show. My husband took pictures – big pictures – and he put them on a little shelf and we put a table, two chairs and a clothes rack. It’s all or nothing because we’ve spent everything we have. It was special because five minutes later, someone came in, sat down and started writing the order, and that went on for four days.
marvelous. My first client was Barneys. They sat down and said, “Let’s place an order.” I said, “Yeah, okay.” Every time I had to convince them to pay upfront or give me a letter of credit to produce because I was completely self-supporting everything. But they all agreed, so I could get started. I made my first season, I taped the boxes with Scotch tape, I faxed the invoices because faxing didn’t exist yet—can you imagine?
everyone has their own
People couldn’t pronounce our names, it was impossible, forget it, they never even started. They just saw that there were six new designers and the six designers were all very different and everyone liked someone out of the six and they just called us “The Six” because it was a lot easier and it was special because the six designers came from a country where no one expected anything. I remember one of my first clients asking me, “Belgium, where is that?” Even when I came to London for the first time, I had to explain where Belgium was.
Then it became a bit of a myth because everyone had heard of the Six, so every interview I did in my life, the first question was about the Antwerp Six. I was crazy; but well, I’m used to it now, see. It has become an imaginative story – there is a group of six children who set out to do everything themselves, each in their own way. Some of us have supporters, others have nothing. I mean, we work hard to get there. If you look at the way things work now, this is unimaginable in the world we live in now. Everything is different, but well, I mean, every time has its own specialness.
