Walter Van Beirendonck Dream the World Awake is rare and strange, a mesmerising fashion art exhibition at RMIT University’s Design Hub. Janice Breen Burns meets the man.
(Main picture: Walter Van Beirendonck photographed for Oxfam Fair Trade.)
Thirty-odd years ago, Walter Van Beirendonck and five mates packed some seriously kooky fashion into a big old van and motored from their Belgian home to London. “We had no plans; just to get out of here, away from the limitations,” he remembers. Nobody from Antwerp’s fashion scene had yet made a global splash; they fancied they might have a crack. “We were desperate.”
At London Fashion Week, an agent latched onto the six friends, recognising something momentous in their crazy designs. Something pinging in the Zeitgeist. It was 1986 and fashion was cresting. Japanese designers Yamamoto, Miyake and Kawakubo had recently broken its Paris-Milan design duopoly with a revolutionary aesthetic. Consumers were hungry for clothes to make them stand out, not blend in to their fashionable crowds. It was time for the Belgians.
Just one small problem; those names. Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Marina Yee, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter Van Beirendonck; all too nutcrackers and pinballs for this fashion agent to pronounce. So she neatly packaged the band of ingenious young hopefuls into “The Antwerp Six”. And it stuck. And spread. And three decades on, Antwerp is still synonymous with fashion ground-breakers in general, and six in particular. “That was the start of our international careers,” says Mr. Van Beirendonck fondly. “When I can bring my vision alive and show it to the world, these are fantastic moments.”
Mr. Van Beirendonck is in Melbourne for Dream the World Awake. We meet ahead of its opening, in the Design Hub’s cavernous exhibition space amid frantic drilling and hammering and a silent battalion of mannequins wearing many of his most bizarre fashion artworks from the past 30 years. I’m reminded of Anna Wintour’s quip in “The September Issue”, that fashion frightens, or unnerves some people. In that case, this lot should terrify the average Sportscraft-wearing Joe or Joanne. For the rest of us, it’s all glorious, palpitating thrills.
Mr. Van Beirendonck is a greyer and slightly more portly, but no less endearing version of the Antwerpian gentle man I met 13 years ago and the last time he was in Australia, as a guest of the Melbourne Fashion Festival. The signature beard is frizzier and peppered now. He wears a youthful, crumpled green overall, sneakers, and flashy knuckleduster rings on most fingers. The gobstopper stones and settings, I have no doubt, are genuine. His nutcracker name may not be known in every household but, aside from his iconic status among fashionados, he heads a thriving eponymous menswear brand that shows seasonally and on schedule in Paris, and is sold across Europe. Walter Van Beirendonck the label, is renowned equally for its designer quality European tailoring, and the choice it offers the visionary chaps who buy it; to dress it down for an off-beat blend-into-the-crowd aesthetic, or up for the full Van Beirendonck.
From Walter Van Beirendonck, Spring/summer 2014, Paris. Photo:www. style.com
“I do like these topics,” he says when I steer us first into supernatural matters. The highly original “otherwordly” world of Walter Van Beirendonck has always fascinated me. I wonder if his unfaltering originality for 30 years is somehow plugged into certain beliefs. Other dimensions? “I like topics like aliens,” he says earnestly. “And I like to think, what is happening next to us? I enjoy to believe! This is always reflected in my work.” Recent portraits of Mr. Van Beirendonck as part reptile, yeti or, most recently for the Antwerp launch of Dream the World Awake (below), toadstool with a frog on top, might also have an otherworldly or sub-human sub-text but, when I mention it, I twig that conversation thread has broken. “I do like to reinvent myself,” he says helpfully. “To try different variations, different appearances….”
© Photo : Jean Baptiste Mondino, 1996
He relentlessly experiments, takes risks, is a consummate original and because of it, a magnet for new markets every year, specifically that group most ravenous for newness, the teen-to-20 somethings. “Oh, yes, this is really nice,” he says. “That my product is attracting young people who were not born when I started. On the other hand, I have another kind of audience that started to like me 30 years ago and they are now in their 50s.”
He’s matter-of-fact about why he has both markets, and more in between. “I never had this goal to be totally original; it just happened because I always think in a very personal way, do it very honestly and straight from my heart. I’m also, not so easily pleased and I’m very critical about what I am doing.” He’s a stickler for quality and believes risky design, if underpinned by it, can last in a changing world to be appreciated by new generations.
(Pictured, from his recent spring/summer 2014 runway collection at Paris menswear week. Photos: www.style.com)
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Industry insiders call it heirloom fashion. It’s a concept that embraces many of Mr. Van Beirendonck’s other commitments, for example, to sustainable and ethical production. He won’t resort to cheap production in developing countries, uses traditional centres in Europe and laborious, often expensive and exclusivity components including rare technical crafts and dyes. Every colour in every Walter Van Beirendonck garment for example, from his Flame Scarlet to Placid Blue, is created exclusively. “These colours are part of me now, and my way of thinking,” he says. “You can feel the atmosphere of these colours as you walk around (the exhibition).”
Renowned Melbourne fashion historian and RMIT associate professor Robyn Healy, says Mr. Van Beirendonck has found myriad ways to be brave, and a provocateur. “He invites people into a playful darkly humorous world,” she says. “His designs do more than clothe people, they startle, incite laughter, inspire others to think about and challenge stereotypical images and archetypes associated with gender and appearance.”
His may be the kind of oft-scoffed-at fashion that most people would leave on a gallery wall,but associate professor Healy says its potency belongs in the public domain. “(It) demonstrates the power of fashion to express diversity and difference,” she says. “(And) set against an increasingly homogenised global design environment, Walter Van Beirendonck shows how small independent design practices shift ideas about dress and dressing, showing the potency of small enterprise.”
For Mr. Van Beirendonck, fashion’s ultimate raison d’etre is also his own: “It is to dream, of course.” he says. “It is important, that when you buy clothes, it creates a moment of happiness, that you put it on and immediately, you want to enjoy it, cherish it..not to buy it to show off, or be the coolest, but to be happy.”
Walter Van Beirendonck: Dream the World Awake
July 17 to October 5. The exhibition is the first major international event to be presented in RMIT’s Design Hub building, supported by philanthropist, business leader and ardent supporter of the arts Naomi Milgrom AO, assisted with the visionary sponsorship of Sofitel Melbourne On Collins. It was originally mounted at MoMu–Fashion Museum Province of Antwerp in 2011. It features more than 70 outfits on revolving mannequins, runway videos, photographic installations and an eight-metre ‘Wonder Wall’ of Mr. Van Beirendonck’s creative vision.
CURATOR’S TOUR
WEDNESDAY 17 JULY 3 – 4PM
RMIT DESIGN HUB, (Cnr. Victoria and Swanston Streets, Carlton) PROJECT ROOM 1, LEVEL 2 »
RSVP EVENTS@RMIT.EDU.AU
DISCUSSION
WEDNESDAY 17 JULY, 6.15PM START
ACMI CINEMAS, FEDERATION SQUARE (Cnr. Flinders and Swanston Streets, Melbourne).
Free tickets available on the day from the ACMI Tickets and Information Desk
Join Antwerp’s Mode Museum Director Kaat Debo for a special curator’s tour on the first public day of the Walter Van Beirendonck: Dream The World Awake exhibition at Design Hub. Follow up this insightful tour with a conversation between Chris Dercon and
Kaat Debo at ACMI Cinemas.
LECTURE » CHRIS DERCON
THURSDAY 18 JULY 11AM – 12.30PM
RMIT DESIGN HUB, LECTURE THEATRE, LEVEL 3 »
RSVP BRONWYN.HUGHES@RMIT.EDU.AU
Join London’s Tate Modern Director, Chris Dercon, for a compelling public lecture on curating, art and all things fashion at RMIT Design Hub. Co-hosted by Professor Jeremy Diggle, RMIT University School of Art.
RMIT DESIGN HUB
designhub.rmit.edu.au
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
