Ann Demeulemeester, who is perhaps the most original of the talented fashion designers who work in Antwerp, recently opened her first freestanding boutique, a space that’s as provocative and unexpected as the clothing on display. Mannequins in plate-glass windows dangle from the ceiling on steel cables, wooden floors remain roughed up, and almost the entire space is white. Demeulemeester was one of the Antwerp Six, the original band of local designers to make it big, which also includes Walter Van Beirendonck and Dries Van Noten, the Ralph Lauren of Belgium.
“Making clothing is not just fashion, it’s a form of communication,” says Demeulemeester, explaining her summer 2000 collection with an engaging passion that was easy to understand once I saw the clothing: Fragments of phrases from rocker Patti Smith’s book of poetry, Woolgathering, are hand-embroidered on transparent white or black silk blouses to be worn over tunics; photographs by Jim Dine, taken specifically for the collection, have been screened onto dresses.
Walter, created from a former parking garage, is another of the hip boutiques in Antwerp, here just off up-and-coming Nationalestraat, which links the Zuid with the city’s historic center. In the back of the store, a huge polyurethane bear comfortably reclines. Owner Walter Van Beirendonck says that all kinds of people come to shop, “from mink-coat ladies to techno-kids. The old bourgeois culture is giving way. Antwerp has a great pop-kitsch sensibility that comes from old films, television, and modern visual culture—and everyone’s in on it.”
Perhaps, but one of the keys to the rise of fashion in Antwerp is the stodgy, if ever-reliable, diamond industry, which employs 30,000 people and has a turnover of $15 billion a year. And, beyond the hip and chic of the Zuid, a preoccupation with 16th-century opulence and comfort is still very much a part of the historic heart of Antwerp, where the prevailing atmosphere remains profoundly and quite authentically that of the northern Renaissance.
If any great metropolis liberates with an abundance of choice and an option for anonymity, it is rare that such freedoms abound in a city as snug and intimate as Antwerp, with only 500,000 people, its suburbs included. Antwerp is a Catholic city, with an almost Mediterranean joie de vivre, unusual for a town some 50 miles up a muddy river from the North Sea. Historically liberal and with a proud tradition of humanist thought, Antwerp has always been a great European center of culture. In the 16th century, the Portuguese established a distribution point in Antwerp for spices and precious commodities from the lucrative East Indies trade, and in 1531 a stock exchange was founded in the city, later to serve as a model for those established in London and Amsterdam. Banking innovations, such as the first letters of credit and bills of exchange, accelerated the explosive growth of the city. Just a few decades later, Antwerp attracted more than 1,000 foreign trading offices and was the second-largest city in Europe after Paris. Around that time, the Portuguese began trading Indian diamonds here, which drew Jewish gem dealers fleeing persecution in Portugal and Spain.You get a good look at Renaissance Antwerp inside the Museum Mayer Van den Bergh, where Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s masterpiece Mad Meg not only depicts an apocalyptic vision of war but also provides caustic commentary on gluttony, lust, greed, and amoral ambition. And if many of the region’s 16th-century artists represented in the museum were keen to show off their technical mastery by portraying the sheen on a newly opened oyster or the transparency of glass, they also revealed the gourmand tendencies of the city’s rich burghers by painting exotic and expensive Spanish citrus fruits, bottles of French wine, and plates of lobsters.
Antwerp is also a latter-day city of guilt, having served as the launching pad and countinghouse during the savage exploitation of the Belgian Congo by King Leopold II in the 19th century. During the Nazi occupation, the city behaved with an ambivalent passivity, although there were notable exceptions. Most recently, Antwerp has given birth to the Vlaams Bloek—White Block—a far-right party that is ominously well represented on the city council. Within the city limits, though, you’ll find two mosques, five synagogues, one of the highest percentages of foreign-born citizens for a European city its size, and an almost nonexistent crime rate. Freud would have loved Antwerp.A walk down Nationalestraat tells Antwerp’s diverse story. Here is a Cypriot grocery next to a slick take-out sushi place, itself flanking a shop that sells spectacularly odd and tacky ceramic figurines—not just ballerinas and Harlequins but generic American Indians, plus Fred and Wilma Flintstone. Next to it is a chocolatier sporting campy portraits of Prince Philippe of Belgium and Mathilde d’Udekem d’Acoz, his new bride. And everywhere are the old-fashioned greengrocers, each displaying bunches of freshly pulled radishes that are as comely as any bouquet of roses. There are bakeries selling French bread as well as sturdy, dark Germanic loaves armored with seeds; butcher shops with hares and pheasants neatly arranged in their original finery; and cheese vendors selling French, Dutch, Italian, and English varieties as well as bright-yellow butter to be cut from a massive mound into manageable slices. The whole street is a delicious comment on the importance Antwerp attaches to eating well.
This may explain why Garnich Didier, considered the best chef in the city, operates with the intensity of a surgeon. A few minutes after ordering at De Matelote, his snug yellow dining room in a narrow 16th-century house, you encounter his precision and obsession through stunning hors d’oeuvres—stuffed mushrooms, cheese straws, marinated fresh anchovy canapés, and salmon tartare. Didier’s talent is nowhere more obvious, though, than in his fish dishes, such superbly conceived creations as house-smoked wild Scottish salmon steak with asparagus and Zeeland oysters, and sea bass with a bread-crumb and herb crust on a bed of confit tomatoes and lemon.
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