La Cambre in Brussels is surely the closest thing to utopia on Earth for fashion students. Funded by the Belgian government, it’s almost free, and even non-EU students pay just 4,174 euros annually (a comparison to sicken US and UK students struggling under tens of thousands in fees.) It’s not the inexpensiveness which makes La Cambre Mode’s fashion department stand out as an educational phenomenon, though. It’s the dizzying number of alumni names-to-conjure-with who’ve studied under Tony Delcampe in the school, set in a 13th-century abbey in this quiet, beautiful Belgian city. Names such as Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent, Nicolas Di Felice of Courrèges, Julien Dossena at Rabanne, Julian Klausner at Dries Van Noten. Not to mention Marine Serre, Ester Manas, Louis-Gabriel Nouchi, and Marie-Adam Leenaerdt, all of whom are making a mark with their own businesses.
Everyone in the industry is wildly curious to divine exactly what kind of sorcery takes place here. This year an international jury of buyers, curators, designers, headhunters, PRs, the legendary Belgian makeup artist Inge Grognard, and editors—me amongst them—came to see the class of 2025. There were just 12 of them. Often, you sense a vibe running through a class. This year, there was a lot of experimentation with multiple surfaces, latticed, caged silhouettes, bodies submerged as if in furniture, carpets, or vehicle upholstery. The human form merging with inanimate objects. Not a lot of sex or sensuality involved.
Yet, as is often the case, the students’ themes, research, and techniques became much more alive—and amazing—off the runway and in conversation.
French student Théodora Hadj Moussa Laube made a collection based on the idea of a sailboat, splicing strips of wood veneer together with delicate, hyper-feminine florals. “I had this idea that living life is like being on a boat. It’s very personal,” she said. “I had this kind of metaphor that it was a very beautiful way to live.” She made a parallel between corsetry and boning and the curves of a ship’s hull, fusing fabric and wood laminate in an incredibly light way.
She won top marks of the year. “I knew I had to come to La Cambre,” she said. “I need to learn techniques, and love the seriousness of the school. I felt really happy when I was doing this.” Tony Delcampe, the head of the faculty, would have been pleased to hear this. Technical innovation is pushed at the school—a kind of specificity of developing ideas which will always result in fashion ideas. “In many schools, I think today, they say they have to express themselves, to do whatever—something that is not related with garments,” said Delcampe. “But our goal here is to make garments, to generate new ways of thinking, new volumes of fabrics and finishing, that’s what we think is most important.”
Alexandre Piron scored highly for his menswear collection based on trucks and trucker culture, using molded Alcantara cab components, displaced seat upholstery, and heavy rock posters. Loïc Bernier transferred his experience of working on construction sites to look into the industrial padding and specialist materials used in fine art shipping.
Lionel Gallez graduated with a collection which he’d kicked off by studying how shirts and sweaters were laid out as still lifes in menswear catalogues and old-fashioned stores. His lineup transcended concept and ended up on his rail as a fully resolved collection of bright cable knit sweaters, and lots of odd-preppy layered striped shirts and appliquéd bowling shirts. He seemed fully ready to sell that collection, which would brighten up any store with its instant hanger appeal.
Delcampe and his team focus on getting designers industry-ready. Their students have the luxury of taking five years to develop their ideas; and, even more crucially, they are required to take four long-term internships as part of their studies. Paris is a short train ride away, and houses welcome La Cambre students’ design discipline. They’re French-speaking, so language is no barrier. Meantime, the students learn on the job how Paris houses operate, seeing and working in departments, getting to understand supply chains and image communication.
This is how La Cambre makes future creative directors. “It’s in the culture of the school,” said Delcampe. His alums are slow burners who work their way up and then, five or 10 years later, burst into visibility with major appointments at houses. This happened all at once, when Nicolas Di Felice, Julien Dossena, and Matthieu Blazy—super-honed professional talents all around 40—joined their peer Anthony Vaccarello in the public eye. The @lacambremodes Instagram page shows how many there could be on their way up behind them, cohorts of junior designers and studio managers populating teams at Celine, Alaïa, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Courrèges, Jacquemus, and beyond.
Matthieu Blazy once told me how important the multidisciplinary first year curriculum at La Cambre was to forming a 360-degree vision of what a brand can be. The fashion department is within the school of art and design housed in that ridiculously bucolic campus. Its prospectus lists “intense technical training as well as classes in history, philosophy, aesthetics, literature, semiotics.” It also supplies perhaps the most important piece of armor for entering the fashion world: classes in law.
For all the free and lovely liberal-artsy sound of all this, it is not easy to get into La Cambre. That’s another ingredient of its success: low student numbers and luxuriously long duration of study. At a time when comparable academic departments in the world are being forced to take on more students while cutting course duration and hiking fees, La Cambre can afford to be selective. In stark contrast to other university admission processes—which these days seem to involve little more than uploading digital portfolios and Zoom interviews, at best—La Cambre requires candidates to sit a four-day entrance test in Brussels. As well as setting creative, visual, and intellectual challenges, there’s a sewing test to pass.
The next cohort of hopefuls will be sweating out that daunting task between August 25 and 29. And one more thing that might make candidates fall at the first hurdle. Although La Cambre welcomes applicants from everywhere, its classes are taught in French. To contend, you must be fluent.
Nothing is insurmountable, though: before applying, take French and sewing lessons, and think deeply about why you want to be in fashion in the first place. Shopping for valuable fashion degrees is a serious business these days, and La Cambre’s is one of the most valuable of all. Delcampe outlined the kind of practical, imaginative, and motivated people they are looking for: “Our students not only have to care about image, they care about sewing, doing, making, and understanding a market they have to exploit. They have to materialize everything.” La Cambre cements personal creativity and produces employable people who can contribute their viewpoints to fashion. People around fashion have often remarked on one more distinguishing characteristic that La Cambre generates in its alumni—their personable, non-arrogant niceness, even at the top of their careers. Fashion needs more of this. “Well,” Delcampe said with a smile, “it’s not a circus here, not a spectacle.”
