À Londres
At a certain point, the Golden Spindles were done. We wanted to continue, we wanted really to be real, not making clothes for a contest, but to make clothes to put on the market, to show to the world. We were all very naive, but very ambitious. So everybody tried to make a collection and 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.’ The others had already decided to go, but I was pregnant and I didn’t have a collection yet, the only thing I had ready was sunglasses. So they went to London and they took my sunglasses. [It was] in ’86 that they went to London, but I wasn’t there, I was giving birth to my son.
The third time I had my collection ready. At first I was hesitating because my goal was to make a collection and to go to Paris, but then I thought, ‘Okay, maybe it’s nice to go to London,’ because London seemed a bit nicer to me in the sense that if you make a mistake, it’s maybe not such a big deal in London.
I spent every penny I had to make a little collection and we went to London and we had this little stand at the British designer show. My husband made photos—big photos—and he put them on a little stand and we put a table, two chairs and one rack of clothes. It would be all or nothing because we spent everything we had. It was very special because after five minutes, somebody came in, sat down and started to write orders, and it went on like that for four days.
It was amazing. My first client was Barneys. They sat down and they said, ‘Let’s make an order.’ And I said, ‘Yes, okay.’ And each time I had to convince them to pay upfront or to give me a letter of credit to be able to produce because I was completely self-supporting everything. But they all agreed and thanks to that I could start. I produced my first season and I scotched-taped the boxes, I telexed the invoices because faxes didn’t exist yet—can you imagine?
Each to Their Own
People couldn’t pronounce our names, it was impossible, forget it, they didn’t even start. They just saw that there were six new designers, that all six were very different, and everybody liked somebody of the six, and they just called us the Six because it was so much easier, and it was special because it was six designers coming out of a country where nobody expected anything from. I remember my first clients asked me, ‘Belgium, where is that?’ Even the first time I was in London, I had to explain where Belgium was.
And then it became like a little bit of a myth because everybody had heard of the Six, so every single interview I have done all my life, the first question was about the Antwerp Six. I went crazy; but okay, I’m used to it now, voilà. It has become the story that speaks to the imagination—that there is a group of six kids who just start all by themselves doing everything themselves and everybody in his own way. And some of us had a backer, others had nothing. I mean, we worked to be there. It’s unimaginable in the world we live in now if you see how things function now. Everything is different, but okay, I mean, every time has its particularities.