Geert Bruloot opened Louis in 1986, the year the Antwerp Six showed in London. Ten designer and independent shops worth the walk now, checked address by address.
Author: Bo
Our shopping and fashion expert, Bo, has an eye for style and a love for all things retail. They’ll guide you through Antwerp’s top shopping destinations, from high-end boutiques to quirky vintage stores.
Kloosterstraat: Antwerp’s antiques street, built beside a lost abbey
The Kloosterstraat takes its name from St Michael’s Abbey, founded in 1124 and demolished in 1831. Its traders now list 76 addresses, from a record shop with 100,000 singles to a sixteenth-century town house.
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, 363 years old and famous for fashion
David Teniers founded Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1663. Its fashion course, started in 1963, produced the Antwerp Six, and its most famous student, Vincent van Gogh, was told to repeat a year.
CronopiO: a bookshop on the Zuid named after Cortázar’s creatures
CronopiO, at Kasteelpleinstraat 21, sells books in Dutch, English, Spanish and French and pours coffee and wine. Its name comes from a writer born in Brussels in 1914.
Antwerp Fashion Weekend becomes the Antwerp.Fashion Festival
Antwerp’s fashion weekend now has an official name and a plan behind it. The first Antwerp.Fashion Festival, 4 to 7 June 2026, put on more than 100 shows and drew 26,500 visitors; the next is planned for 2028.
De Groene Waterman: the Wolstraat bookshop its readers own
De Groene Waterman has sold literary and left-wing books at Wolstraat 7 since 1968. It is a cooperative, and in June 2025 Dua Lipa made it her first bookshop of the month.
MoMu fashion museum Antwerp gives the Six their first retrospective
MoMu opened in a former hotel on Nationalestraat in 2002 and now holds more than 38,000 objects. Its exhibition The Antwerp Six, the first on the six designers together, runs until 17 January 2027.
Luddites Books & Wine: the Antwerp bookshop that pays you to stay
Richard Bolte and Jorien Caers opened Luddites in a 1902 townhouse on Hopland in March 2020. Buy a book downstairs and the first glass of wine upstairs is half price.