MoMu, the fashion museum of Antwerp, opened on 21 September 2002 at Nationalestraat 28 with a festival, a gala and a retrospective of Patrick Van Ommeslaeghe, a former student of the city’s Academy. Twenty-four years and some 50 temporary exhibitions later, it is giving six other Academy graduates their first major exhibition together. The Antwerp Six runs until 17 January 2027.

The museum counted more than 115,000 visitors in 2024, a year in which Antwerp’s city museums together passed 1.9 million. That puts a museum about clothes within reach of Museum Plantin-Moretus and its printing presses, which counted 130,000. FOMU, the photography museum, had 93,000, up 39 per cent.

A street cut for commerce

The building is older than the idea of a fashion museum and has been almost everything else first. MoMu’s own history of the site starts in the 1870s, when the city commissioned the Parisian builder Hubert Pierquin to clear part of the old Boeksteeg. Between 1876 and 1884 he cut the Nationalestraat through it, a street about 15 metres wide and 700 metres long. In 1893 Alphonse Van de Put bought a plot from Pierquin and hired the architect Ernest Dieltiens, who also built the Sint-Norbertuskerk.

The result held a shop and a hotel. From 1894 Pierre Einmahl sold menswear and children’s clothes there under the name New England, and A. Bardelli ran the Hotel Central in the same building. In 1908 the rooms became offices for a coal, cement and briquette trader, the Compagnie Générale Coöpérative Charbonnière, and the building was extended in 1910. From 1919 it housed a veterans’ association, an exchange office and the electricity company De Schelde, and the neighbours called it Den Ellentrik. A radio distribution company, IMEA, arrived in 1950. In the mid-1960s the electricity company, by then called EBES, sold the building to the city, and a sheltered workshop used it until 1990.

From workshop to ModeNatie

Fashion moved in at the end of 1997, when the city handed the building to the Flanders Fashion Institute, which used it for events and exhibitions from 1998, among them Vitrine and Mode voor Van Dyck in 1999; in 2000 the Academy’s fashion students showed their graduate work on the ground floor while the plans were drawn. The Ghent architect Marie-José Van Hee had been asked in 1999 to convert the building, and work began in August 2000. On 17 May 2001 the façade was painted fluorescent yellow for Mode 2001 Landed Geland, the city-wide fashion programme led by Walter Van Beirendonck. The Copyright bookshop opened as the first tenant that December, the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where all six designers studied, moved in during the summer of 2002, and the museum opened in September. The building has been called ModeNatie ever since.

The first director was Linda Loppa, who also ran the Academy’s fashion department. The collection did not start with the Academy, though. Its core is the historical collection of Western European costume and textiles from the former provincial Costume and Textile Museum Vrieselhof in Oelegem. In 2011 it gained more than 2,000 pieces from the 18th to the early 20th century from the private collection of Jacoba de Jonge. The museum now lists more than 38,000 objects: clothes and accessories, but also textiles, tools, production machines, patterns and the invitations to fashion shows.

The museum closed for three years and reopened in September 2021. B-architecten, which had already worked on the 2001 colour project, kept Van Hee’s atrium and wooden staircase and added about 800 square metres of public space, including a large flexible room and a permanent gallery for Belgian fashion. MoMu can now show three exhibitions at once across 2,000 square metres. Its shows have travelled to Paris, Stockholm, London, Tokyo, Munich, Istanbul, Enschede and Melbourne.

The Six at forty

The Six are Dirk Bikkembergs, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee. All six trained in the Academy’s fashion department and graduated in the early 1980s. Martin Margiela graduated around the same time and is often mentioned with them, but he was never one of the six; Wallpaper credits the six and Margiela together with putting Belgian fashion on the international map. The earlier version of this article was vaguer on that point; the museum is not.

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Their break came in London in 1986, at the British Designer Show, the event now called London Fashion Week, where each showed a collection of their own. It was improvised. “They nearly didn’t make it on time because they lost the keys to the van that contained their collections,” the MoMu curator Romy Cockx told Dazed. The organisers gave them a small space upstairs that nobody visited, so they went downstairs and handed out photocopied flyers. Buyers came, Barneys of New York among them, and the press gave the group its name. Geert Bruloot, the Antwerp entrepreneur credited with organising the trip, rode along in the van. Forty years later he is the guest curator of the exhibition.

The show opened on 28 March 2026 with about 80 silhouettes, together with personal objects, sketches, ephemera and video. Bruloot, Cockx and the director Kaat Debo are the curators, and Debo had wanted to tell this story at the museum for some time. When she announced it in October 2025 she kept it short: “The Antwerp Six helped shape recent fashion history.” Victor Robyn did the graphics and video, Roman Hiele the sound. Bruloot described the task to Dazed as “how to capture a myth, while doing justice to six radically different designers”. He also plays down the label. “It was not like a pop group coming together and singing the same song,” he told Wallpaper. “They wanted to remain free.” Debo put the same point more sharply: “As the designers often say, the Antwerp Six is both a blessing and a curse.”

Waiting forty years for this exhibition was the right decision. All six designers approved the proposal, sat for long interviews, opened their personal archives and had a say in how their own work is shown, which gives the show an authority a quicker tribute would not have had. The catalogue, almost 400 pages from the publisher Hannibal, has essays by Tim Blanks, Angelo Flaccavento and Eugene Rabkin as well as the museum’s own curators.

Debo told Wallpaper what the six took from their training, and it was a method rather than a style: “They learned that you have to create a world. And you have to present your world.” MoMu did the same with its building: a former hotel, coal office and sheltered workshop that in 2002 became a house for a museum, a fashion school and a bookshop, on a street that was cut for shops in the first place.

Visiting

MoMu began as a museum of the province of Antwerp and now counts among the city’s museums, alongside the MAS on the Eilandje, which sold more than 200,000 tickets in 2024. The museum closes at 18:00 with last entry at 17:00, and tickets are sold online through MoMu’s own website, which lists exhibitions, talks and visitor information. The Antwerp Six comes with a series of public talks and events through its ten-month run.

The exhibition closes on 17 January 2027. The van keys, presumably, are not on display.