“I have always felt like an outsider in this industry,” read the notes for Walter van Beirendonck’s show this season. “I’m not complaining. It’s a place from which you can look at things differently.” That vantage point, from beyond the walls of the fashion industry, has served the 68-year-old designer exceptionally well throughout his lengthy career. It’s probably the secret to his label’s longevity and his seemingly eternal well of inspiration.
What did fashion’s most bonkers pariah have in store this time? The show kicked off with an electric motorbike covered by a yellow sheet that whirred out onto the runway, straddled by an equally yellow-clad model decorated with giant yellow flowers on his front and two plastic yellow assault rifles strapped across his back.
After that, apocalyptic military references came thick and fast. Trousers and button-up shirts were fluoro colored and the texture of tarpaulin or protective sheets; T-shirts were hemmed with strips of shiny vinyl, like taped-up windows; and other baggy trousers and shirts in thin nylon resembled toxic-waste disposal bags. Models occasionally marched out in trios, appearing like gangs of renegade soldiers.
Van Beirendonck cited outsider art as an inspiration this season—particularly André Robillard, who makes guns from found objects and who has spent much of his life in psychiatric institutions. “Something about that moves me deeply,” he wrote.
He also took cues from Afghan war rugs—carpets that depict the paraphernalia of armed conflict—appropriating them onto cute little knitted vests and sweaters; their displays of grenades, attack helicopters, and AK-47s were juxtaposed with love hearts and flowers. In the latter half came full-on flower knits, which eventually extended into flower balaclavas (like Demogorgons from Stranger Things but hippified), before a consummate showing of wool suiting topped with magnified bowler hats and 3D flower caps by Stephen Jones.
Beyond the antiwar message this collection carried, it also spoke to Van Beirendonck’s hope for the future youth. (It’s relevant that the designer has also spent much of his career as a teacher.) “There is a tendency now to dismiss the new generations,” he wrote. “But they are the truth. Youth, in its truest form, is something I want to hold onto forever.” The childish defiance and relentless optimism that he has maintained is something that all of us in fashion—insiders and outsiders alike—can learn from.
