Fashion can be relaxed againBye bye, figure-hugging! That's why we love the XXXL look now

April 6, 2026 around 2:05 p.m Clock

Coats that fall like tents, sweaters several sizes too big, frayed pants whose seat reaches almost to the knees: too big, too baggy, too baggy. Oversize and casualness have long been part of everyday life – visible in the shop windows of large fashion chains as well as in concept stores and on the catwalks. But why is fashion currently so extremely loose?

One answer takes us back to the spring of 1986, when a handful of young Belgian designers set off for London from Antwerp in a rented van. Your destination: the British Designer Show. In luggage: radical, unconventional fashion.

The appearance at the trade fair became the starting point for the group later becoming known as “The Antwerp Six”. The press gave the designers this name – because their names were considered difficult to pronounce: Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Dirk Van Saene, Dirk Bikkembergs and Marina Yee. Today they are internationally known.

Their diverse heritage has evolved and is still evident today: in wide-leg pants that fall straight and wide from the waistband to the hem, in baggy pants with a low waist or in palazzo cuts that flow like a skirt.

The silhouette also changes at the top: coats and blazers slip over the shoulders, become boxy and oversized – with striking power shoulders or low-slung so-called drop shoulders. But oversize was only one of the visible consequences – the radical shift in proportions and body images was crucial.

“They hardly had any money, but they had all the more ideas,” recalled Geert Bruloot. The fashion expert played a key role in this chapter: he organized her presentations in London, which attracted attention and were later considered the starting point of her breakthrough. They broke with a simple idea: that clothes should please. No perfect cuts, no idealized bodies, no fixed rules. Instead: shifted proportions, androgynous silhouettes, neither male nor female.

Bruloot looks back on its 40th anniversary. “Fashion was no longer a commodity, not just a product, but an attitude,” Bruloot continued. Clothing became an expression between art, body and society – a development that he now reflects on as the curator of an exhibition about the myth of the “Antwerp Six” at the Antwerp Fashion Museum, which runs until January 17, 2027.

For Bruloot, co-founder of a Flemish fashion institute, the success of the “Antwerp Six” has a lot to do with a structural coincidence: Belgium, unlike France, Italy or England, did not have a strong fashion tradition. In addition, the young designers had no backers and no large companies in the background. “They were free to do whatever they wanted,” he said.

They came at exactly the moment when fashion was rearranging itself: British designer Vivienne Westwood made the punk aesthetic visible with her London boutique “Sex” in the 1970s. Radical counter-proposals also came from Japan. “Fashion was ready for something new,” Bruloot explained.

Designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons presented their first collections in Paris in 1981 – which thrilled and shocked in equal measure: with frayed hems, wide, shapeless and asymmetrical cuts. Clothing no longer seemed perfectly constructed, but deliberately incomplete. The idea behind it was crucial: fashion doesn't have to be glamorous.

The six Belgian designers adopted this freedom – but in a different way than the Japanese avant-gardists, said Bruloot. At the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp they learned a pragmatic approach: they came to London with clothes that you could actually wear. The designs “were wild, full of color and imagination – but you could wear them”.

“The Antwerp Six” was not a planned movement and never had a manifesto. After about three years, the designers each went their own way – with their own individual style. What remained was a moment that has visibly changed fashion to this day.

Sources used: Sabine Glaubitz, dpa