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For many, Paris Fashion Week kicked off on Monday under a metro bridge in the 16th arrondissement, where Belgian designer Julie Kegels made her official runway debut. The show, entitled ‘Quick Change’, saw models use magicians’ techniques to turn a wedding gown into a slip and a bubble skirt, or a layered shirt into a barely there camisole. It was to represent the many occasions women have to rush through in a day, and also the whirlwind Kegels has found herself in since launching her brand last year.
“The collection started with a scribble in my notes, three words: change, change and change. Because I really had the feeling of being overwhelmed and having a lot of impulses in the first year of having a brand,” the designer says post-show. “So I started to research how a woman can actually change during the day, and how she can play her different roles. [One minute] you’re a loving girlfriend, then you’re running a business, and then, at the end, you have to run to a party. So it’s really about transformation and movement.”
I sit down with Kegels over Zoom a week before the show. She’s had a week of tribulations with show prep in her Antwerp studio and has just come out of the other side before heading to Paris. “Last week was really a rush to finish everything. But I’m good. We’re almost finished, and we’re leaving for Paris on Thursday for the casting and fitting. It’s super exciting. Everything feels on track.”
Now in its fourth season, Julie Kegels is a six-figure business, with 29 stockists including Nordstrom and H Lorenzo. It’s early days and she has just two employees, but sales grew 33 per cent from Spring/Summer 2024 to AW25. I decided to do this profile on Kegels during Copenhagen Fashion Week, when a buyer from a French store told me she was watching the fledgling Belgian brand. She explained that it provided the “classic with a twist” style consumers are looking for right now, as we slowly graduate from quiet luxury.
Kegels made her Paris debut with a presentation last year, in which she staged some mini-shows, as designers tend to do before their official runway moment. “The last show was maybe a turning point. When we came back from Paris, we really felt like there was something growing,” Kegels says. “We felt like we should follow that growth. There’s just three of us; and out of nothing, there was a lot of response and a lot of energy.” This season, Kegels’s main goal is to develop her European business. Currently, European stores represent a small proportion of her sales, versus Asia-Pacific (37 per cent) and the US (33 per cent).
As a teenager in Antwerp, Kegels became “obsessed” with the Antwerp Six (Belgian designers Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene and Marina Yee). So while finishing school, she applied to their alma mater, the Antwerp Academy. “Everyone was always like, ‘Oh, it’s so difficult, you will never get in.’ And then I passed,” she says with a smile. “So that was already dream one that came true.”
At the Antwerp Academy, where she studied from 2018 to 2021, the rigorous fashion design course set her up well for the trials of running a label. “There, you destroy your identity, you invent yourself again. It was there I found my direction and found my interest in contrasts,” Kegels explains. Contrasts are a founding principle of her work. “The brand is based on something very fragile, but also something very powerful — a lot of chaos, but a lot of elegance.”
After school, Kegels took “every job she could” on a freelance basis, before securing a short internship at rising Belgian brand Meryll Rogge. “I learnt from every experience. At school, it’s really focused on the creative part, which is amazing. But during my internships, I could see what happens in a fashion company.”
Building community and experience
In 2021, she moved to Paris to complete a year-long internship at Alaïa, under then-new creative director Pieter Mulier, which really opened her eyes to the mechanisms of a house. “I suddenly understood that there are so many departments to make it all come to life,” Kegels says. “There’s so much beyond a collection or the production — there’s the press and the merchandise and how you make a collection plan. I saw it all happening, and it made me very excited. I love structure.”
Before striking out on her own, Kegels sought advice from contacts and industry peers, and managed to secure some private investment from family and undisclosed industry contacts to produce her first collection. “I thought, I’m super young and there is a chance that I can do this now, so I’m going to take it because if I don’t do it now, maybe I’ll get scared,” she says. “I can take risks, and I don’t have other responsibilities.”
Since the buzz around her presentation-cum-show last season, Kegels is increasingly looking beyond the collection. “I’m thinking about the community, a sales strategy. We have to keep close to the core of the brand,” she says. “But because we are flexible, we can also adjust the whole time and find the best way for how it works.”
Pulling together Monday’s show was a team effort from members of Kegels’s creative community. The show’s art director and in-house photographer are both former classmates. Even one of her employees, who helps on design, “was a guy that I met the first day of [Antwerp] Academy. Since then, we have never separated from each other.”
Alongside him and Kegels, they also now have a team member working on business development, so that Kegels can keep focused on the creative. “At some point, it’s funny that you have to put a label on someone’s job,” she says. “That’s also something that happened this season. Before it was kind of free and suddenly it’s like, ‘OK, now you only do that.’ You have to create structure as you become more of a company. Now, we need to be a bit serious — and it’s good to see my [employees] grow.”
Production challenges
Like any young brand, Julie Kegels is faced with production challenges. Kegels manufactures in Portugal and Romania, alongside her native Belgium. Though she’s still building personal relationships with suppliers, which is crucial to getting a good place in the production queue and making orders on time. “It’s super difficult because you don’t have so much time to just go there, or you don’t have the budget to go there the whole time and to visit them — so that’s also really not possible,” Kegels says. “But that’s a goal for the future. I think it would be very helpful.”
Kegels built her US and Asia-Pacific business via sales agents in the regions, and based on the success, she’s hired a European agent this time to scale that market. “It’s strange because we’re from Europe, but everyone is always saying it’s more difficult,” she says. “[European consumers] are a bit slower to trust brands, and I get that.”
In the meantime, the designer doesn’t want to force things: “We want to be patient; that’s important for us. Because if you force something, they will also drop you. And you really want to have a steady relationship with everyone.”
Facing a challenging wholesale market, Kegels is working on her direct-to-consumer (DTC) business, producing drops that differ from the collection in third-party stores. Her revenue is mostly from wholesale right now, but with the new drops, she’s learning more about those who shop directly with the brand. “We started out selling expensive pieces on e-commerce, but now we know that doesn’t work, so we’ve changed it,” she says.
E-commerce is also proving fruitful when celebrities wear her clothes. In May, Dua Lipa wore a strong-shouldered denim jacket from the label, which sold out on the brand’s site “in a second”, Kegels says. Another dress with a green lining, which the brand shared on its Instagram, also performed well DTC. “That’s working for us, because people find it more approachable.”
The goal, ultimately, is not to create a trend or hype, but “to grow in a sustainable way, and do everything step by step”.
Post-show, Kegels confidently explains her approach and her mood board to a throng of smiling journalists. With an interesting concept, a woman’s point of view and a little bit of star power, perhaps this show will propel her label even further.
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