Dirk Bikkembergs

From Law School Ambitions to the Antwerp Six

Dirk Bikkembergs was born in Bonn, Germany, where his Flemish father was stationed at the time — a beginning that placed a Belgian designer in Germany through a parent's posting. After high school he was interested in attending law school because he found lawyers so chic, but he eventually decided instead to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium. The reason he gave for nearly choosing law is telling: it was the look of lawyers that attracted him, so the eye for appearance came before the training. In 1982 he graduated together with Ann Demeulemeester, Dries van Noten, Dirk van Saene, Walter van Beirendonck and Martin Margiela, and together they came to be known as the Antwerp Six. A shared graduation year and a shared city became a group identity the fashion world could name, and Bikkembergs' career begins inside that collective label as much as under his own name.

Shoes First, Then Paris

His solo start came through footwear and prizes rather than a full collection. In 1985, after winning the Canette d'Or award for Best Young Designer in Fashion, Bikkembergs was given the opportunity to create his own men's shoes collection. The first line featured perforated soles and highly original laces, creating an uproar at the time — small, functional parts of a shoe treated as the place for invention. He also got himself noticed at the British Design Show in 1986. Only in 1989 did he go to Paris and launch his first menswear collection, followed by the women's collection in 1993. The sequence matters: a young-designer award, a shoe line that caused a stir, notice in Britain, and then the Paris menswear debut, four years before womenswear was added.

Military Aesthetics and Identical Lines

The influence of Bikkembergs' origins is palpable in his designs. Many of his clothes betray a preference for military aesthetics: robust materials and simple shapes, austere lines, abundant use of leather and many virile details such as belts. That vocabulary — durability, simplicity, austerity, leather, belts — describes clothing built like equipment rather than ornament. His first women's collections extended the same thinking in an unusually literal way: apart from size, they were identical to his menswear lines. Rather than designing a separate feminine version, he offered women the same clothes at a different size, which follows logically from a military-inspired aesthetic in which the garment's character comes from its materials and construction, not from gendered decoration.

Sport-Couture and a Life in Motion

To say Bikkembergs likes movement is an understatement: he divides his time between Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, London and New York, rarely seen in any one place for more than a week, describes himself as a workaholic, and once told ID magazine that he is married to fashion and will remain faithful. Movement also became his market. Since 2000 he has been particularly popular with young people after launching the Bikkembergs Sport line, including the t-shirts with the famous footballer, and this sport-couture gave him the opportunity to design the clothing for the Inter Milan football club. He was the first fashion designer who received permission to hold a fashion show in the famous FC Barcelona football stadium, Nou Camp. A designer whose clothes drew on military kit ended up dressing a football club and showing inside a stadium — sport not as a theme printed on clothing, but as the actual setting of the fashion.