INTRODUCTION

The Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten van Antwerpen) is one of the oldest of its kind in Europe. It was founded in 1663 by David Teniers the Younger, painter to the Archduke Leopold and Don Juan of Austria. As the master of the Saint-Luke’s Guild of painters, sculptors, engravers and book printers, he wrote a petition to the Spanish king Philip IV, in which he explained that the guild wished to establish a public and free academy in Antwerp in order to ‘...encourage the said arts and raise their esteem’. As an example he cited the famous schools of Rome and Paris; the school in Antwerp was to serve the same goal of aiding ‘... the advancement of the said arts in the States of Your Majesty’.

By the sixties, in our present century, the general opinion had stopped considering the ‘applied arts’ to be of lesser value than the ‘traditional arts’. In accordance with the spirit of the times, a number of new departments were added to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts: graphic design, photography, jewellery, ceramic arts and Fashion design. Mary Prijot championed the establishment of a fully-fledged fashion department within the Academy. She gave the fashion department an international appeal and set evry high creative standards, both for fashion drawing and later, for fashion design. Together with Marthe Van Leemput, who added the subjects of tailoring and pattern design to the curriculum, she drew a blueprint for the fashion department, a plan which still serves its purpose extremely well. Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Van Saene, Dries Van Noten and Martin Margiela are designers who graduated from the Academy in the beginning of the eighties, when the fashion department was under the patronage of Mary Prijot.

In the beginning of the eighties, the fashion world and the international media started to get interested in Antwerp fashion designers. From then on, the fashion department of the Royal Academy shared in this international interest, not in the least because of the continuous quality of the collections designed by some of the now aforementioned famous ex-students and a new generation of designers as Wim Neels, Veronique Branquinho, A.F. vandevorst, Jurgi Persoons, Stephan Schneider, Angelo Figus, Bernhard Willhelm, Anke Loh, Christophe Charon, Bruno Pieters, Tim Van Steenbergen, Marjolijn Van den heuvel and Haider Ackermann amongst many others.