Ann Demeulemeester Leaves Her Label

There’s a generation of women who will feel like rising to salute a heroine of fashion integrity today. Ann Demeulemeester, the woman responsible for defining slouchy Belgian cool in the nineties, has written to her friends—in her own beautiful handwriting—to say she’s moving on from the company she founded in 1985. Her very personal sign off says it all about the integrity and human values her fans have admired in Demeulemeester over nearly 30 years. She’s leaving the industry, she writes, as “a happy and fulfilled person.”

As a member of the vastly talented Antwerp Six, who graduated from the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1986 (she was a classmate of Dries Van Noten), Demeulemeester created a highly recognizable fashion uniform for a clan of working women who constitutionally objected to power suits. Her deconstructed suiting, trailing long skirts, and drapey white shirts were functionally elegant and subtly suffused with the indie attitude she continually tested against the principles and poetry of her own muse, Patti Smith.

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Demeulemeester’s growing band of appreciators became a kind of tribe who saw themselves reflected season after season in the family of models who roamed her Paris runways. Her ever-evolving deconstructed-minimalist wardrobe strode on in its own path, strong enough to transcend and withstand trends—even when fashion veered toward cocktail dresses and bling, Demeulemeester showed her grateful faithful exactly how to ignore it.

That won her an emotional connection with the public, which went further than the aesthetics. As she built her company in her own way, Demeulemeester also became a symbolic leader for her peers in refusing to sacrifice motherhood for her career—at a time when fashion industry employers openly doubted whether women designers could do both. When Demeulemeester and her husband, Patrick Robyn, had their son, Victor, she simply had a connecting corridor built between her home and her workspace so she could see her baby any time he needed her and got on with it. Her son now grown, her fashion career completed, Demeulemeester now leads another rare group of pioneers—fashion designers who have done it on their own terms, and are managing to walk away to a private and happy future. Bravo.