ANN DEMEULEMEESTER

ANN DEMEULEMEESTER

ANN DEMEULEMEESTER closes Saturday’s programme as one of the defining names of the influential Antwerp Six generation of Belgian designers. A graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Demeulemeester launched her eponymous house in 1985, building a design language over subsequent decades around dark, poetic, deconstructed tailoring — asymmetrical draping, exposed seams, and a predominantly black and white palette rendered with a romantic, almost gothic intensity that drew heavily on music, poetry, and androgynous silhouette work. 

Demeulemeester stepped back from her own house in 2013, with the brand passing through several subsequent creative directors while working to preserve her founding aesthetic of romantic austerity. The house has more recently been under the creative direction of Stefano Gallici, who joined in 2023 and has worked to reconnect the label with Demeulemeester’s original poetic, subculture-inflected design language after a period of stylistic drift, while introducing his own sensibility to the brand’s now four-decade design vocabulary. 

For S/S 2027, ANN DEMEULEMEESTER closes Saturday’s runway continuing a legacy built on romantic darkness and technical asymmetry — one of the clearest surviving threads from the Antwerp Six’s original 1980s disruption of the Paris fashion establishment.

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