Where else would you be able to witness Matthieu Blazy deep in conversation with Anthony Vaccarello in one corner, while Julien Dossena and Nicolas Di Felice joke with Lea Peckre in another, and Marine Serre, Julian Klausner, and Olivier Theyskens roam the same room? Only in Brussels.
This surreally friendly gathering of creative directors from across today’s luxury fashion landscape took place at La Cambre Mode[s] school, the extraordinary alma mater which binds all of them together. With fellow independent alumni Marie Adam-Leenaerdt, Louis Gabriel Nouchi, and Cedric Charlier, they’d dropped everything to serve as the graduation jury for the department’s 40th anniversary. In particular, that is, to applaud Tony Delcampe, the educational powerhouse who formed them.
In case that roll-call sounds like too much insider name-dropping (which is very much not a Belgian thing), we should spell it out. Blazy has his second Chanel haute couture show just around the corner. Vaccarello is working on the Saint Laurent men’s collection he’ll present in a couple of weeks; ditto Julian Klausner for Dries Van Noten and Louis-Gabriel Nouchi for his own lable. Julien Dossena released his Rabanne resort collection last week. Olivier Theyskens just caused a frisson of excitement over the launch show for his new enterprise, Boloria, due on July 5. Lea Peckre, meanwhile, is working behind-scenes with Nadège Vanhée on the much-anticipated Hermès couture debut.
Marine Serre put her finger on the leveling atmosphere of the La Cambre reunion of many generations. “We love to see each other, and I think we understand each other a lot. The joy and the pain,” she laughed.
“We were so close and collaborative,” Peckre added.
“When you look around, you see that they have a kind of joy” Olivier Theyskens exclaimed. “When you see all the names of the past students, and you see where they are, it’s amazing.”
In true Delcampe style, the organization of the Show Off event, as it’s called, combined professional runway polish with low-key democratic interaction between the jury and students in a showroom set-up. Following a runway show for the Masters students (both years one and two), the jury and other guests talked to each graduate. It was two hours devoted to intense conversation, with no one on their phones, which may be some kind of record.
Tracking back, Theyskens was the first designer to burst on the Paris scene from La Cambre with his dramatic gothic-romanticism in 1997 when he was just 20. (Madonna immediately snapped him up.) “I’m the veteran,” he joked. That was the first time the fashion world became aware that there was another Belgian fashion school, other than the Antwerp Academy, which had famously generated the Antwerp Six, a decade earlier.
