Antwerp gets dressed up for fashion festival

Antwerp is the thinking person's fashion capital, a place where designers are nothing short of intellectuals. And now a remarkable festival has transformed the city into a 24-hour fashion show. REBECCA LOWTHORPE reports.

Billions of diamonds, big docks, nice paintings, fresh mussels, great beer, delicious chocolate, and a baroque cathedral bang in the centre of town. What more could a city want? But Antwerp has more. It's Europe's least likely and most cutting-edge fashion capital. And, if that's still not enough, until 7 October the city - its streets, shops and buildings - has become the canvas for the Mode2001 Landed-Geland, the world's most extraordinary fashion festival.

Entire buildings are wrapped in fluorescent fabric. Shop windows have been turned into avant-garde fashion installations. A piece of scrub land is the unlikely venue for "Radicals", an al fresco exhibition of whacking great rotating billboards that flash up the hippest of images. Even the city's police station - an imposing edifice built in the style of KGB headquarters from a Bond film - has become the surreal setting for Emotions, a video installation where faces from the worlds of art and fashion (from Gilbert & George to Giorgio Armani) reveal their most intimate fashion experiences.

Amid all this "aesthetic terrorism", as the festival organisers call it, you never know who you might run into. It could be the queen of Belgian style, Ann Demeulemeester, cleaning out the Perspex dovecote that stands next to the changing-rooms in her minimalist white-washed store. Or Dries Van Noten buying a sandwich in Lenny's on Wolstraat. Or Raf Simons, the young menswear guru (with a bunch of fashion students), in a disco that resembles a jungle. It might even be fashion's high priestess Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons, who will host five fashion events over the coming months, as her contribution to the "2Women" exhibition which also includes a retrospective of Coco Chanel's work. All of this in an otherwise sleepy, provincial city.

It was in 1980 that Antwerp became irreversibly fused with fashion. Six young designers from the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts were invited to present their collections together at the London Designer Show. Despite each having a distinctive style, they were lumped together because nobody could be bothered to attempt to pronounce their names. Instead they became known as "The Antwerp Six": Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene and Walter Van Beirendonck.

The Six pioneered looks that were avant-garde, yet for the most part, eminently wearable. They refused to toe the line established by the flashy glamour of the Italians, or the commercial rigour of the Americans, and instead laid down their own uncompromisingly hip visions. In time, they inspired a new generation of Academy students to follow in their footsteps: Veronique Branquinho, Raf Simons, Olivier Theyskens, Jurgi Persoons, AF Vandervorst, Bernhard Willhelm. Their shows have become the hot tickets on the Paris schedule where they present their collections.

One of the original Six is the curator behind Mode2001. Walter Van Beirendonck, a mountain of a man with cropped hair and impressively long beard. You wouldn't want to get into the ring with him, but you would want his creative muscle behind such an ambitious project. "They [the city councillors] asked me to come up with a concept that would embrace Antwerp, something that could be appreciated by everyone in a completely non-elitist way. Fashion can be so unreachable for most people," he says, gently running his colossal silver knuckle-dusters through his beard.

The exhibition, "Mutilate?", at Museum Hedendaagse Kunst, is Walter's baby, the festival's jewel in the crown. "I called it 'Mutilate?' to make it clear that it was a question, not an absolute. It came out of a willingness to question the role that fashion has played throughout history in deforming the body," he explains.

Giant projections of images and film footage show shocking examples of rituals that have used the body as a canvas in the name of fashion, and as signs of social status and religion: the elongation of skulls, as carried out until the 1950s in the Congo; and the custom of feet binding practised by Chinese women until it became illegal in 1911, shown alongside a glass case containing examples of Golden Lotus Feet - elaborate slippers no more than 7cm long.

Then there's a billboard-sized photo-shoot of Amanda Lepore, the infamous transsexual, who has "sacrificed" herself to - the wonders of? - plastic surgery. "You know, she recently turned up to an opening at the Guggenheim in New York in the nude to show off her body, her perfect dress," says Walter in a tone of awed reverence.

Lepore is juxtaposed with a circular room full of revolving mannequins, dressed in striking examples of how today's designers have attempted to embellish or disfigure the proportions of the body with clothing. Among the more exotic examples is Rei Kawakubo's infamous lumps and bumps collection; Hussein Chalayan's plastic airship dress; Martin Margiela's exaggerated plus-sized clothes; and Viktor & Rolf's ballooning sleeves, so huge they resemble giant wings.

Between the showcase of 18th-century corsets, panniers and bustles - all astonishingly replicated in paper for this exhibition - is la piece de resistance, "Mr Pearl's Room", a room shaped like a corset. "I hope it conveys elegance and the possibility of something out of the ordinary, but also adds to the mystery and fantasy surrounding corsetry," says Mr Pearl, as he gently places The Bleeding Torso, a bead-encrusted corseted jacket that he made for Vivienne Westwood, onto a pedestal.

It is the first time that Mr Pearl's wasp-waisted designs, usually seen on the runways of everyone from Thierry Mugler to Alexander McQueen, have been exhibited under his own name. This is because Mr Pearl lives in Garbo-esque seclusion, outside the limelight in Brighton, and it is to Van Beirendonck's credit that the corset maker, and many other big international names (most notably Kawakubo) have joined forces to make this, Mode2001 festival, so special.

That's not to say that Antwerp itself is under-resourced so far as talent goes. Its track record for producing so many world-class fashion designers in just two decades is astounding. Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts provides the constant source of innovative talent. "The students learn to be creative without any money and, most importantly, they learn to be independent. The college doesn't have much money, so they learn to go into business long before they leave school," breezes Linda Loppa, head of the Academy's fashion department, and key organiser of Mode2001. Of the 55 students who started four years ago, only four will graduate. It is, by all accounts, the most rigorous fashion college in the world. But as Van Beirendonck, himself a tutor there for the past 17 years, points out: "There cannot be 20 designers every year who will make it. That's impossible."

The festival's success is proof that in this small town a colossal creative community exists; a network of original thinkers from different disciplines - art directors to architects - who have happily collaborated to make it all happen. Crucially, this community spirit - a rare thing in the fashion world - is backed up with generous government support: along with crucial sponsorship, Mode2001 was made possible by the government's injection of BF240m (£3.6m).

No wonder the local designers don't want to move away. All of them, save Margiela, whose dream it always was to set up his maison in Paris, have stayed. "It's an inspiring place. There's a quiet atmosphere to work in. Rent is low. There's great production here, a strong knitwear industry. The quality of life is good. Why go somewhere else?" asks ex-Academy student, Bob Verheist, consultant curator on the "Emotions" exhibition, a typical Antwerp creative, who moved back to the city after working in Warsaw, Rome and Hong Kong.

"There's a creative boom here," says Linda Loppa. "It's all about a network of friends - artists, designers, architects. The 2001 project is an extension of our laboratory of working together."

Mode2001 is nothing if not ambitious. Soon, Nationale Straat, the buzzy main street that runs through town, will be dubbed Fashion Straat. There, come September, a project called "Vitrines" will see retailers donating their shop windows as a showcase for students at the Academy. And, next March, a grand building, currently being renovated will open as Mode Natie. A hub of all things fashionable, it will house the Royal Academy's fashion department, a fashion museum, the Flanders Fashion Institute (which Loppa set up in 1997 to help promote young designers), as well as a library of some 5,000 books, a communication centre, conference rooms, workshops and a (presumably fashionable) restaurant.

Visit Antwerp in the next five months and be astounded by the delicious chocolate, the fresh mussels and the Mode2001 exhibitions. But don't, whatever you do, let anyone catch you making jokes about boring Belgians.

Mode2001 Landed-Geland runs until October 7.