Marina Yee, one of the Antwerp Six, succumbed to cancer this weekend. She died on November 1, 2025, All Saints’ Day, a Catholic celebration of canonized saints, as well as those “who lived the Gospel faithfully and quietly in their daily lives.” This is very much the manner in which Yee lived; she followed her own fashion creed and centered herself in her creativity.
Elusive, reclusive, and almost hermetic, Yee once described herself to writer Eugene Rabkin as “a lone wolf.” An individualist, she protected her freedom fiercely. This wasn’t born of pride, quite the opposite. As a child Yee was uprooted many times, and reading her interviews one gets the sense that she occasionally felt like a snail without a shell. In addition to outside circumstances, there were her internal struggles, some of which concerned where she stood in relation to art and fashion. “For years, I existed in the form of a two-legged question mark. Haunted by this dilemma of what kind of artist I was, a dilemma that made me hyper-vigilant,” the designer told 1 Granary.
While self-questioning, the designer’s vision was unwavering. Yee, says Kaat Debo, the director of MoMu, was “a sensitive soul who knew exactly what she wanted.” And that was a slow, quiet, personal approach to fashion; garments with soul and a story. All of Yee’s clothes featured a removable “Oscar Wilde” ribbon of black cotton.
A “new old-fashioned person,” Yee worked mostly with vintage garments. She was especially attracted to coats and utilitarian garments which she “listened” and responded to instinctually. The changes she made to classic silhouettes were few but always carefully considered and deliberate. An example is her M.Y. bomber with a panel of hand cut vintage denim at one side of the jacket. Her deconstructed Eliah jacket, meanwhile, looks rather like a Cubist creation. Speaking with Chris Maradiaga of Duchump, Yee described her way of working using a Flemish expression that means “‘with one corner off,’ which is making something perfect and breaking something to disturb it, with natural intuition.”
Yee taught and worked quietly on her own projects and for others for many years. In 2018, at the invitation of the Japanese vintage boutique Laila, she publicly returned to fashion on her own terms. In 2021 she launched M.Y. “Freedom and individuality were of the utmost importance to Marina,” Debo tells Vogue. “She pursued an unconventional career, always searching for her own terms on which to create fashion. And although she stepped away from the system for a long time, she continued to work tirelessly in the privacy of her own studio both as an artist and as a designer. Her body of work transcends the boundaries of fashion, a testament to her remarkable talent. Moreover, she had the courage to resist the conventions of the fashion industry.”
Asked what her goal was in 2018, Yee had this to say: “Maybe that some people will like to wear my clothes. It’s a very simple answer, of course. It’s about chasing recognition. Not really. Of course, maybe I’m lying a bit. We all want recognition if we create something. But [my clothes] are very practical in a way (laughs). It’s in the detail that they have something special that’s a bit hidden. It’s not so flashy at the first moment. I hope that people will enjoy the beauty of the details and maybe also understand and participate in this idea of a slower fashion—more quiet, actually.”
Marina Yee: Timeline of a Creative Life
1958
Marina Yee born in Antwerp, the daughter of antique dealers. According to Wanderful, she came to fashion on her own through her mother’s copies of 100 Idées and Marie Claire and “moved no less than 14 times before she reached the age of twenty.”
1973
At 15, enrolled at Sint-Lucas Institute in Hasselt.
1976
With Martin Margiela moved to Antwerp and enrolled at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts. “I didn’t have any expectations because fashion didn’t really exist at that time,” she told Wanderful in 2017.
1981
Graduated with colleagues—Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs, Dirk Van Saene, Dries Van Noten, and Walter Van Beirendonck—who became known as the Antwerp Six, a group organized by graphic designer Gerrit Bruloot. “I knew we would only stand a chance if we stuck together, Bruloot told Sarah Mower in 1987.
In a 2025 interview with 1Granary, Yee explained: “We [the Antwerp Six] were the showpieces of the ‘Belgian Textile Plan’ launched in 1981, a federal plan of measures to help build the industry. Part of it entailed a promotional campaign by the Institute for Textile and Confectionery Belgium. The two main pillars of the ITCB were the magazine Mode, dit is Belgisch and the Golden Spindle Contest. One thing led to another, and we got caught up in something bigger before we knew it.”
1982
First participation in the Golden Spindle fashion event.
1984
After this Golden Spindle, Yee was approached by Sonja Noël of Stijl boutique who wanted to sell her prototypes.
1986
The Belgian takeover of fashion started in London with the participation of the Antwerp Six in a trade fair called the British Designer Show.
In a 1997 profile of fellow Six member Ann Demeulemeester, Vogue wrote, “The Antwerp Six put their designs in a van and flew to London where they participated in the trade fair that launched them as a group internationally and designated Antwerp as a fashion city.
It was improbable that she and five other fashion students from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp would get any notice when they pooled their resources in 1986, rented a van, and trucked their modest fall collections to the London shows. It was improbable that the international press and buyers would dub the group the Antwerp Six, a designation that had a lot to do with finessing their difficult Belgian names. Stylistically they had little in common except their training at the academy, a rigorous place that can claim alumni like Rubens. But in fashion, even a name that doesn’t make sense is better than none at all.”
Worked for Belgian labels including Gruno Chardin and Bassetti. Designed under her own label Marie through 1990.
1989
According to Business of Fashion, soon after Martin Margiela presented his first show in a playground in Paris, Yee took a break from fashion. “He [Margiela] took my person as an inspiration…I was the muse, and you take things that feed your creativity, the persona, the hair, the makeup,” the designer told Eugene Rabkin. “Some people said it’s Marina who’s walking there [in Margiela’s first show] and it was…I wanted to be my own inspiration and not inspiration for someone else.”
In an interview with Duchump’s Chris Maradiaga, Yee reflected back on the time of her withdrawal from fashion. “I think it’s maturity too. I was very insecure before. I was searching for love, for acceptance, ready to crawl over the floor for anything—I didn’t do that, but I was unhappy. That’s why I stopped fashion around the same time. I was so insecure, and I didn’t know who I was—and then there was Martin, and Ann, and Dries, and they were all very business-oriented, and backups, and families, and money, and they had it in their blood. I didn’t. I was just an artist, and I didn’t. I didn’t know, I was an artist, and that’s a lonely position.”
Pregnant with her son Farah, Yee moved back in with her parents where she got creative with odds-and-ends they had around the house which she successfully sold at markets. At her brother’s suggestion she moved to Brussels, where he lived, and set up shop. In 1992, it also became a cafe called Indigo.
2000s
Throughout the 2000s Yee designed for the theater and for other designers, including Dirk Bikkembergs.
2018
Tracked down by Hideo Hashiura, the owner of the Tokyo boutique Laila, Yee launched a series of coats under the label M.Y. “I wanted to show a formula of making fashion that fit me,” Yee told Vogue at the time. “After not being part of the fashion system, of the fashion world, and the commercial way of participating like my colleagues, I’ve been taking a lot of time to live a bit of a secret life, or tranquil life,” “Also to mature in my artistic experiments and also finding my way to who I was. After so many years, I think I have learned so much. And I always stayed a fashion designer. I always designed things, or made things for me, or sketched them. I also always absorbed what was happening in the fashion world. Not only what my fellow colleagues did, but also the changes in the market and so on. So I thought it was a good moment to go out and come out with my qualities, and this collection as a fashion designer.”
Tells Another, “I am a bohemian, and I create all the time and I will never stop.”
2021
With the encouragement of creative consultant Rafaël Adriaensens, Yee got back into fashion. “In 2021, just after turning 60, she launched her own label again, M.Y. Collection, with which she planned to present a new collection every season,” MoMu’s Kaat Debo told Vogue. “It was a sustainable brand through which she wanted to show that fashion also had a human side. Bigger, better, grander was never her ambition. Sustainability and integrity, on the other hand, were her guiding principles.”
2023
Yee, who had long been working for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (KASK) in Ghent, and in the Textile and Fashion Department at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) The Hague, retired from teaching. “Personally, passing on knowledge and reassuring students that there is no such thing as failure drove me as a teacher,” Yee told 1 Granary.
2024
Yee received the Jury Prize at the Belgian Fashion Awards. “What moved me most was not so much the award itself as the reason the jury had chosen me. I specifically recall trend forecaster Li Edelkoort’s words, who mentioned that, instead of disappearing from the stage and vanishing into anonymity, I have been able to come back, and come back strong. How I stood my ground all these years was phenomenal to them. Only then did it dawn on me that I had indeed been brave,” the designer said in the 1Granary interview.
2025
Yee’s work is displayed in the exhibition “40+ Years of Stijl” at the Fashion and Lace Museum in Brussels.
MoMu announces “The Antwerp Six” exhibition for 2026.
Marina Yee died, aged 67. “The collection will continue, it was Marina’s biggest wish, as she just started in 2021,” Andreasson told Vogue. “I will make sure her legacy continues [with] the designs she has created over the past 20 years in the privacy of her studio. We will not invent new styles.”
