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source: nytimes.com
August 27, 2006
Ann of Antwerp
Thomas Struth
By CATHY HORYN
The setting of the Le Corbusier house where the designer Ann Demeulemeester lives and works in Antwerp reflects her place in the fashion world. It stands at the edge of a treeless lot near a highway overpass, isolated both aesthetically and physically from the apartment blocks in the southern part of this Flemish city. The original owner of the house, built in 1926, had hoped to establish a Modernist community, if only to counter the local gingerbread, but it never came. What came instead was a world war and senseless urban planning. In 1985, her career not yet begun, Demeulemeester and her husband, Patrick Robyn, who was trying to establish himself as a photographer, bought Belgium’s only Le Corbusier house and started to restore it. Now, except to travel to their country home, 30 minutes away, they rarely leave Antwerp.
‘‘I’m not confused about what’s happening in fashion, because I follow my direction and go,’’ Demeulemeester says one afternoon at her dining table. She has laid out plates of salad and cold tuna and opened a bottle of wine. She is 47, and the lines of her face have begun to set in, but it is still a fascinating face to look at, pale and vigilant and framed by dirty-blond hair. Victor Robyn, the couple’s only child, an art student in Brussels, has dropped by and left with friends. When Victor was 3, his parents built a studio next door, with offices and a private entrance for the family, so that Demeulemeester wouldn’t have to feel like she was actually leaving her son to go to work. Today the family compound consists of four buildings. Although the house is by no means a shrine to its architect, Demeulemeester and Robyn are eager to play host to Le Corbusier’s ideas. There are the original paint colors — chocolate, azure and cream for the main room. There are simple light fixtures and cool, black-tiled floors. There is, as well, the grid of windows facing a small walled garden. Demeulemeester seems oblivious to the traffic beyond the open windows. She says she doesn’t pay attention to other designers’ work: ‘‘I never study what others are doing because it doesn’t help me.’’
This seems strange. At a moment when many designers, along with architects, star chefs and art dealers, feel driven to be everywhere in the world — in China, at the latest art fair, opening a hotel in Dubai — Demeulemeester is interested in only her world. Her influence is pervasive this season. Among those designers like Marc Jacobs and Miuccia Prada whose power we readily trust, if only because they more easily monopolize one’s attention, there was a strong sense in their clothes of Demeulemeester’s proportions, her asymmetrical cuts, her blunt, northern femininity. Discharging their ladylike tweeds and presumably the women in them, designers now spoke of ‘‘urban females’’ and ‘‘the warrior woman,’’ ignoring, as Sarah Mower of Vogue pointed out, that this has been Demeulemeester’s single-minded view for 20 years.
Demeulemeester says she was unaware of her influence until a journalist mentioned it, and then, even in the collections where it seemed most obvious, like Marc by Marc Jacobs, it wasn’t evident to her. ‘‘When I looked at the clothes, I didn’t see my thing,’’ she says. She is at least sensitive to the prevailing rhetoric. ‘‘I hate when people suddenly say, ‘And now we are going to do the glamorous woman, now we’re going to do the strong woman,’’’ she says, studying me. ‘‘Sorry, I am a strong woman. And I go for it. I don’t have to play this game.’’
Demeulemeester and the other Belgian designers of the late 1980’s, among them Martin Margiela and Dries Van Noten, made their reputations by opposing and even mocking the barbarism of the decade — none more so than Margiela, who made clothes from recycled garments and plastic trash bags and set himself up as a virtual designer, remote and unanswerable, before the term was fully understood.
It may be that in the current climate of opportunism, with its what-do-I-get-out-of-this attitude, people again want clothes of substance and surprise. Clearly Demeulemeester thinks so. ‘‘I don’t think women can take superficiality much longer,’’ she says. ‘‘They want a soul again. I’ve always worked with this emotion. That’s why people are turning toward me, I think.’’
Demeulemeester graduated from Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1981, the same year that Rei Kawakubo showed her first Comme des Garçons collection in Paris. Kawakubo, with her almost brutal cutting techniques, proposed that women were strong and selfdetermined. Demeulemeester, born a generation later, just assumed that they were. Both her father and her grandfather earned their living drying chicory for the coffee market, and when she was 16, she met Robyn, a local boy who already had leanings to become an artist. Demeulemeester says the only time fashion entered her consciousness in her girlhood was when she made drawings of classical portraits; she noticed the relationship between the subject and his clothes.
At the academy, she says, she felt like an outsider ‘‘because I was not fashionable in the eyes of the others.’’ Though Belgium produced children’s clothes and fine tailoring, it had no fashion identity, and of the two old women who taught Demeulemeester pattern making, one sewed her own clothes and the other was extremely rigid. She believed that you should not put white and black in the same outfit. ‘‘That was my big discussion with her,’’ Demeulemeester says, smiling.
‘‘And she was, like: ‘Ann, you can’t use white. It’s not chic. Use offwhite. Chanel used off-white.’ Chanel was her ideal. So I had a big fight with her. All these things were happening, punk in London, and she was living in her Chanel, off-white world.’’
‘‘The Antwerp Six’’ was a media appellation born in London in the late 1980’s to help manage foreign-sounding Flemish names. In reality there was little communal spirit in the group. ‘‘Everybody was doing his thing,’’ Demeulemeester says. ‘‘We weren’t doing things together.’’ By the early 90’s, the Belgians had established themselves as devout individualists at the Paris shows, with Demeulemeester projecting a militant, and often tender, modernism. Her women looked cool and tough, as if they had just finished a gig in Rotterdam. Though she has always pursued experimental cuts and fabrics, like the papery leather she used this past spring for a stunning white shift, her clothes follow a narrative, which was a problem in the 90’s, when designers fell under one extreme influence after another. ‘‘I had the impression, around 1995, that all of a sudden the weather changed,’’ Demeulemeester says. ‘‘It was all about these big houses. Gucci had started. For me, it was the opposite of freedom. I couldn’t understand.’’
Demeulemeester wants to show me her studio, and we head upstairs, which, like the rest of the house, has black-tiled floors and wall colors so deeply pigmented that they resemble velvet. We follow a passage into the adjoining building and enter a large white studio with a copy of Man Ray’s hanger mobile. Few independent designers have the luxury of such space. In the mid-90’s, Demeulemeester asked Anne Chapelle, an acquaintance and businesswoman, to run her company, and, as Demeulemeester says, Chapelle restructured the business ‘‘as a little multinational.’’ Later they created a holding company that today includes the rising Belgian star Haider Ackermann.
We pull out photographs taken by Robyn of early collections, beautiful portfolios produced despite the fact that the couple had little money. Demeulemeester is often associated with Patti Smith, but to my mind her clothes have never resonated more emotionally than when she collaborated with the artist Jim Dine. ‘‘I saw his photos in a gallery, and it was one of those moments that you don’t have often,’’ she explains. ‘‘I could feel it in the pit of my stomach. I felt sick. I came home and wrote him a letter. I had to do it. And four or five days later, he was sitting here in my studio and saying, ‘O.K., we’re going to work together.’ Can you imagine?’’ The result was exquisite asymmetrical dresses with silvery-gray photo prints of birds of prey.
For fall, as other designers were paying homage to her past work, Demeulemeester explored drapery, creating wrapped dresses that lent mystery to her tailoring. She has her store in Antwerp, which each week sends hard-to-find pieces to clients in New York, and I know women who have as much Demeulemeester stashed in their closets — skinny T-shirts, boyish black boots — as they do Prada. She recently expanded her men’s collection and would like to do a perfume.
‘‘I never organize or plan things,’’ she says. ‘‘I go step by step. Maybe it’s safe like this, I don’t know.’’ Demeulemeester smiles, coyly, and you know that this thought doesn’t trouble her in the least. She says: ‘‘I just wait because I think people will find me. And I’m not the kind of person who will knock on somebody’s door. I wait. If they’re good for me, they will come towards me.’’
Lars Klove
Jeff Riedel
The designer’s restored 1926 Le Corbusier house in Antwerp.
Don Ashby
Jim Dine photo prints graced the 2000 summer collection.
] but i liked his paintings so much. and it's good to have someone more familiar now to make an association with. 
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