The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp was founded in 1663, and it is best known around the world for a course it started three centuries later. Fashion design arrived in 1963. Today it counts about 600 students and researchers from some 50 countries. It teaches on three campuses in the city centre: the main building on the Mutsaardstraat, where all the theory classes are held, graphic design on the Keizerstraat, and fashion on the Nationalestraat.
A painter’s petition
The founder was David Teniers the Younger, court painter to the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and later to Don Juan of Austria, who petitioned King Philip IV of Spain for a royal charter. The Academy grew with the city. In 1885 King Leopold II commissioned a National Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp, modelled on the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1890 the Academy’s own picture gallery became the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, which later moved to its present building. Architecture split off in 1946 as a separate national institute.
The modern administrative history is a sequence of mergers. In 1995 the Academy became a faculty of the Hogeschool Antwerpen, the city’s university college, and since September 2013 its courses have been offered by AP, the Artesis Plantijn Hogeschool Antwerpen, formed by merging two colleges. It now teaches three things: visual arts and design, conservation, and a one-year teacher training course.
Ten weeks of Van Gogh
Its most famous student stayed for one winter. Vincent van Gogh arrived in Antwerp in November 1885, rented a room above a paint dealer’s shop and, in January 1886, passed the entrance exams for painting and drawing. He began drawing from plaster casts on 18 January. He soon fell out with Charles Verlat, the director, and with the drawing teachers Franz Vinck and Eugène Siberdt. When Van Gogh drew the Venus de Milo as the torso of a peasant woman, Siberdt corrected the drawing so hard that he tore the paper, and Van Gogh shouted at him: “You clearly do not know what a young woman is like, God damn it!”
The legend says he was thrown out. The record says otherwise: on 31 March 1886 the teachers told 17 students, Van Gogh among them, to repeat the year. He spent his free time in the museums studying Rubens, whose house is the subject of our piece on the Rubens House, bought Japanese woodcuts in the docks and added carmine, cobalt blue and emerald green to his palette. By the end of March he was in Paris, sharing his brother Theo’s flat in Montmartre.
Henry van de Velde, who enrolled in 1880, studied painting under the same Verlat and then turned to design: in 1907 he founded the Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, which merged with the Weimar art academy in 1919 to form the Bauhaus, and in the 1930s he designed the Boekentoren, Ghent University’s library tower, finished after the Second World War.
The fashion department
Mary Prijot taught the generation that made the course famous. In 1980 and 1981 six of her students came out of the course: Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee. In 1986 they rented a vehicle and drove their collections to London, where reporters who could not pronounce their Flemish names called them the Antwerp Six. Martin Margiela, often counted as a seventh, came out of the same Antwerp scene just before them, did not show in London, and moved to Paris to work for Jean Paul Gaultier before starting his own label.
Linda Loppa, who had taught at the Academy since the early 1980s, ran the department from 1985 to 2006. In 1996 she co-founded Mode Antwerpen, a forerunner of the Flanders Fashion Institute, and in 1998 she became the first director of the fashion museum, MoMu, which opened on 21 September 2002 and reopened in September 2021 after a three-year renovation. From 2007 to 2016 she ran Polimoda, the fashion school in Florence. Walter Van Beirendonck, born in Brecht in 1957 and a graduate of 1980, later led the department until 2022. Of WOEST, his collection for winter 2016/2017, he said: “It’s a Flemish word, my language. It means ‘furious.’ Because I am really angry.”
Dries Van Noten, born in Antwerp in 1958, graduated in 1980 and opened his shop, Het Modepaleis, in 1989. The Spanish group Puig bought a majority of his company in 2018, and in March 2024 he announced his retirement after 38 years; his last collection was menswear for spring and summer 2025. His view of the business was always practical: “I’m a little naive but I don’t like the idea of showing things that you don’t sell in a store.”
Putting a fashion course inside an academy of painters and sculptors in 1963 might have looked like an indulgence. It was the best decision the Academy made in three centuries, because that course, and not the painting school Van Gogh attended, is what made the name known far beyond Antwerp.
Van Gogh was one of 17 students told to repeat the year in 1886. He did not stay to find out whether he would pass the second time.
Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
- Address: Mutsaardstraat 31 (main campus), Keizerstraat 14 (graphic design) and Nationalestraat 28 (fashion), 2000 Antwerp
- Founded: 1663, by David Teniers the Younger; fashion design since 1963
- Who runs it: AP Hogeschool Antwerpen (Artesis Plantijn), since 2013
- Students: about 600 students and researchers from about 50 countries (2025 to 2026 fact sheet)
- Why it works: it teaches fashion with the seriousness of a fine arts school
